Produced: Canada, 2001
When Atanarjuat won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, it was widely celebrated as a watershed for Indigenous cinema since it was the first Inuit-produced film to win this prestigious prize. Based on a traditional Inuit legend and set in Igloolik in an unspecified past long before European explorers arrived in the Arctic, the narrative spans several decades. It tells the story of Atanarjuat, whose father Tulimaq was denied his rightful place as the tribal chief, and the ensuing feud between two families.
As I argue in my forthcoming book Exotic Cinema, Atanarjuat invites us to examine the boundaries and relationship between ethnographic realism and exoticism.