Salluit performer basks in summer successes

ODILE NELSON

This summer, it seems like nothing but sunshine is coming Elisapie Isaac’s way.

Last month, Isaac’s film Si le temps le permet, If the weather permits won the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Grand Prize at the 13th annual First People’s Festival in Montreal June 10 to 22.

The 26-year old’s directorial debut beat out more than 50 other entries to win the award, named after Menchu Tum, an indigenous Guatemalan who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for bringing her people social justice and building bridges between her culture and others.

Isaac is also in the middle of touring with her group, Taima Project, and preparing to release the duo’s first studio album this winter.

For Isaac, the momentum is tangible and she’s only too happy that her personal success is turning a southern eye on Nunavik.

Si le temps le permet recounts the difficulties Inuit communities are having as they try to bridge their traditional heritage to modern culture.

In an interview with Nunatsiaq News this week, Isaac said the film essentially wonders aloud how Inuit can find a true sense of pride that will guide them in the future.

“I think we’re a little bit disorientated sometimes and we don’t realize how fast time is going on, the changes that are happening right before our eyes. I think it’s also to accept that we are in the modern world now,” she said.

The documentary explores this by centering on two villagers from Kangiqsujuaq — Naalak Naptaaluk, a community elder, and Danny Alaku, a young police officer.

But the documentary also explores Isaac’s own search for identity.

“I really wanted to show each person has the right to say how they feel. To stand up and say I am Inuit but this is who I am and how I want to go about with my future and our future,” she said. “I think it’s a very personal voyage I went on with this film and I came back knowing much more about who I am.”

Isaac is the daughter of an Inuk mother and Newfoundland father. An Inuit family from Salluit adopted her soon after her birth.

In 1999, she left Salluit and began studying communications at Montreal’s John Abbott College.

Two years later, she found herself working on her first film script.

Originally, Isaac said she wanted to make a film that would honour her grandfather and the ITN, of which he was a member. ITN is the group of Nunavimmiut hunters who opposed the James Bay and Northern Quebec agreement in the 1970’s.

“They had something to say and they said it in a very humble, straightforward way,” she said. “Some people may have said they were very naïve but I think they were looking at the future very clearly… I think we need to look at our history and the people who made a difference.”

But in the end, a friend convinced Isaac to write a more personal script and use that to apply for a National Film Board of Canada’s First Nations Filmmaker Award.

In 2001, she won the bursary (worth about $200,000) designed to encourage young indigenous filmmakers to produce their own movies.

The bursary’s end result is a multi-layered film that may ask straightforward questions but does not provide easy answers.

At one point, for example, Isaac questions whether life was better or worse before the Inuit encountered Quallunaat.

“My mother would often say ‘I remember the days when it was all dark outside and it was cold but there was no noise, no ski-doos, no being afraid of someone who might be drunk outside. Oh, I remember those times when it was peaceful,’ I think that is something we sometimes forget,” she said.

Yet, winning the award for her film is only one of Isaac’s artistic successes this summer.

Taima Project is also riding high. The group just returned from the Calgary Folk Festival and is set to play another festival in Chicago by summer’s end.

The duo, which consists of Isaac and Alain Auger, blends Isaac’s folk background, she sang with the Salluit Band when she was 14, with Auger’s ambient music. The group will also be releasing its first studio album this winter.

With all the momentum that her career is gathering, Isaac said she is doing her best to keep herself grounded. Isaac now lives in Montreal but she tries to return to her home village of Salluit a couple of times a year.

“I think the fact that I’m in the South, I have to recharge myself sometimes,” she said. “Here you are constantly ‘the Inuk girl.’ It’s good that, people are curious and I want to share my culture. But sometimes I just want to be simple Elisapie.”