Filmmaker shares knowledge and love of storytelling

MIRIAM HILL

Saimataq Michael is all smiles as she stands up from her seat at the Mariner Lodge in Iqaluit and stretches her arms.

Michael, one of a group of four, has just finished the last morning of a workshop on traditional storytelling in television, film and video with world-renowned film director Zacharias Kunuk.

The workshop is one of six being held by Inuit Communications Systems Ltd. for professionals in the Nunavut TV, film and video production industries.

Michael, a long-time employee with IBC, says she has been to workshops in the past, but this is the first time she’s attended one in Inuktitut. “Here’s it’s more flexible and it’s easier to speak in Inuktitut and we understand each other,” she says.

The workshop, funded in part by the Kakivak Association, was a perfect venue for Kunuk, who has spent years trying to bring oral Inuit stories to the screen.

“What I’m trying to do is get them to dream,” he says in an interview during a break. “We talk about a lot of things, talk about stories and even night dreams, because with today’s technology people can see it.”

Making a commitment to a project and being creative in working through it is of the utmost importance, he says, and if his experiences in filmmaking can help others, then he’s done his job.

“Inuktitut filmmaking is totally different to the southern way of filmmaking, which is like a military undertaking,” he explains, speaking softly and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. “In Inuktitut it’s horizontal — you’re always talking with your crew, your actors, and everybody has to understand what’s going on.”

Sometimes actors wait for an entire day on the set before their scene is called and they need to understand this process to put up with it, he says.

Kunuk has been working with this group of four for three days, discussing every aspect of storytelling in TV, film and video, from the logistics of shooting on the land, to script writing, to costumes. He is also engaging them in exercises to help them think more creatively.

“Yesterday I had my students draw their interpretation of heaven and hell,” he says. “It’s part of imaging because before you make a film you have to imagine the scene, imagine who’s there and why they are there.”

While the stories are there, waiting to be told, he says, the most challenging aspect of reproducing them on film is working with animals and with the weather — things that aren’t controllable. There are also cultural norms that are stretched.

“In our culture we have to respect the elders,” he says. “In my experience of directing a 63-year-old to ‘Do it again, do it again. It was all right, but you have to do it again,’ they’re supposed to be telling us what to do, but now we’re telling them what to do.”

He said it’s fine if the elders know what’s going on. It’s just one aspect of the commitment that a filmmaker makes when he or she undertakes a project.

Following the success of his feature film Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner, Kunuk has given lectures around the world, but this is the first time he has offered a workshop to Inuit students and, he says, it’s been easier and more fun than the others.

He hopes to instill them with a greater sense of confidence and knowledge of how to take a project from inception to completion in a creative way.

Michael says it has broadened her sense of broadcasting. “Although I have been with broadcasting for a number of years it never really occurred to me that I was so narrow-minded and this has shown me that,” she says, adding that she hasn’t been as creative as maybe she should have been over the years.

“It has been a most excellent workshop,” she says, and admits that maybe she’ll be able to produce something of her own this summer.