Inuk filmmaker among recipients of Governor General’s Arts Award

Filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk will receive a 2026 Governor General’s Award, the Canada Council for the Arts announced Wednesday.

Kunuk, who was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2002 and who received the Order of Nunavut in 2019, is receiving an Artistic Achievement Award, one of eight awards that recognize artists for their contributions to contemporary visual and media arts.

“I was honoured to be selected,” Kunuk said in an interview. “When I started my career, I never dreamed I would be doing this and receiving awards.”

The other recipients are Faye HeavyShield, a Kainai First Nations sculptor and installation artist based in Alberta and  Skawennati, a Kahnawakeronon multimedia artist based in Montréal, Québec, a Canada Council for the Arts news release said.

They will each receive $25,000 and a bronze medallion. They were selected by a peer committee of artists and arts professionals, the release said.

The award comes 25 years after the release of Kunuk’s first feature-length film, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, which he had hoped would coincide with the creation of Nunavut in 1999.

But the production ran into a year of funding difficulties, Kunuk said, as the filmmakers tried to secure support in a system dominated by English- and French-language productions.

“We had to fight the system for a whole year,” he said.

Released in 2001, Atanarjuat was the first Canadian dramatic feature film produced entirely in Inuktitut. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Camera d’Or for best first feature.

Kunuk bought his first video camera in 1981 and later recorded elders talking about hunting and life on the land for the Inuit Broadcasting Corp.

That work eventually led to the creation of Igloolik Isuma Productions in January 1990, which launched IsumaTV. It now features more than 7,000 films and videos in 84 languages.

Kunuk has continued making films including The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Maliglutit (Searchers) and One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, which represented Canada at the 2019 Venice Biennale and won Best Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

His most recent feature is the 2025 historical drama Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband), which won Best Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival last year.

Now, Kunuk is producing Qirngaqtuq — Fierce Prayer, an eight-part documentary series that begins with Inuit life before contact and follows the arrival of whalers and Anglican missionaries, he said. It uses footage he has collected throughout his career.

“Most of the time, you don’t have footage of what they’re talking about,” he said. “That drove me to recreate the path — how we saw history from an Inuk point of view.”

Kunuk said he hopes to finish the project this winter.

An exhibition featuring selected works by this year’s Governor General’s Award recipients will open Nov. 7 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, N.B.