And … action! Weekend of movies scheduled at Iqaluit festival

Movie screenings will continue through the weekend in Iqaluit as the Nunavut International Film Festival celebrates its fourth year.

The five-day festival is hosted at the Astro Hill movie theatre and features a northern focus with work by filmmakers from Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Greenland. All screenings are free.

The festival kicked off Wednesday night with a screening of Tautuktavuk (What We See), a film by Carol Kunnuk and Lucy Tulugarjuk.

A full schedule of screenings is on the film festival’s Facebook page.

While the festival has grown to be international, which means it receives submissions to screen northern-focused films created outside of Canada, it started with a focus on education.

“We’ve been running with the children’s Inuktitut film festival for seven years and our organization is made up of educators with a big focus on literacy,” said Holly McCann, project manager for the Nunavut Bilingual Education Society.

“We started doing a children’s film festival where we screened Inuktitut children’s films and then we also would send out DVDs to schools across the territory.”

Films being screened this year at the Nunavut International Film Festival include Imajuik, a short sci-fi horror directed by Marc Fussing Rosbach, IKAARTUIT, a Nunavik-focused movie directed by Annie-Claude Roberge, and Nigiqtuq (The South Wind), an imaginNATIVE award-winning short drama directed by Lindsay McIntyre.

McIntyre has five films being shown at the festival, including Seeing Her and All Around Junior Male in the short film category.

There will be a Q&A with filmmakers McIntyre, Gina Burgess and Cynthia Pitsiulak on Saturday at 6 p.m. at the Astro Theatre.

The festival opened Wednesday and runs until Feb. 25. McCann said that after that there will be a virtual festival for people from other communities to view online.