Filmmaking workshop turns lens on Nunavik youth’s stories

Clockwise from top left, filmmaker participant George Annanack, Dominic Lavoie, Sammy Jr. Gadbois-Kudluk, Nils Caneele and Laurence Baillargeon at the Katittavik town hall, where the Wapikoni crew is based until Dec. 11. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

Kuujjuaq youth Sammy Jr. Gadbois-Kudluk, left, gets some editing help on his documentary from filmmaker mentor Nils Caneele in Kuujjuaq Nov. 28. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

KUUJJUAQ—Sammy Jr. Gadbois-Kudluk sifts through footage he’s captured over the last few months on his GoPro.

Gadbois-Kudluk brings the waterproof, shockproof action camera with him everywhere. He’s taken shots of road trips in and around his hometown of Kuujjuaq; videos of friends and family and scenes of dogs running and barking through its streets.

He hits play on some recent footage he took of his classmates on a boat cruising up the Koksoak River, and then of the students pulling ugly fish off their rods.

Gadbois-Kudluk said he’s always been interested in photography.

“I fell in love,” he said. “I saved up enough money to buy a GoPro. And then I bought a new model.

“Now whenever I get paid I just buy accessories for the GoPro.”

Gadbois-Kudluk said he likes to shoot random, everyday stuff. But the project he’s working on these days is a bit more focused.

He’s piecing together a collage of his images into a documentary about his hometown, Kuujjuaq. And he’s doing it with help from a month-long filmmaking workshop offered in the Nunavik community.

Wapikoni Mobile is a travelling audiovisual studio, a Quebec non-profit organization, which brings filmmaking mentors to Indigenous communities throughout the province to teach film, audio and music production.

Quebec filmmaker Manon Barbeau first launched the project in partnership with the Atikamekw National Council in the early 2000s, naming the organization after a young Atikamekw participant, Wapikoni Awashish, who died in a car accident in 2002.

The travelling studio on wheels has been visiting First Nations communities across the province since 2004, but its recent visit to Kuujjuaq marked its first stop in an Inuit community.

Youth outreach workers and filmmaker mentors Laurence Baillargeon, Dominic Lavoie and Nils Caneele brought all the equipment with them by air this time, setting up at Kuujjuaq’s Katittavik town hall until Dec. 11.

They call it the Kuujjuaq Stopover.

Coming into a new community is no easy task; the crew spent the first few weeks just visiting the local high school, youth centre and other community centres to introduce themselves to local youth.

The trick is showing youth how to use imagery around them to tell their story, the outreach workers said.

“At the beginning, we have to find what they want to say,” Caneele said. “To tell their story… from their unique point of view.”

The first few sessions teach basic skills: how to clean a camera lens or mount the camera on a tripod. Slowly, students start experimenting with shooting techniques.

“What’s the impression you feel when you look at a close-up instead of a wide angle?” Lavoie said. “It’s a way of expressing yourself.”

The Wapikoni crew is working on five different film projects while in Kuujjuaq including a collaboration with secondary school students on an anti-bullying video.

Gadbois-Kudluk, 16, says the Wapikoni mentors have helped him “open up his ideas,” not to mention learn editing techniques and how to lay audio over his footage.

He doesn’t have a name for his documentary yet, but he describes it as a homage to his hometown.

“I like the people here and how this town kind of functions like a mini-city, cause it’s the biggest community in the region,” Gadbois-Kudluk said. “And the landscape—we have trees, and hunting.”

“I just want to show it to people around me and show them: look where we live, look how beautiful it is.”

The Wapikoni crew knows from experience that the final product always boosts the filmmaker’s self-confidence.

“They never know how good they are,” Baillargeon said.

Wapikoni will host a screening of the newly-made short films Dec. 9 at the Katittavik town hall, at 7 p.m. You can read more about the Kuujjuaq Stopover on its Facebook page.