‘Wrong Husband’ transports Toronto audience to prehistoric Igloolik island

Toronto International Film Festival moviegoers line up outside the Royal Alexandra Theatre on Monday night for the festival’s screening of  “Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband).” (Photo by Sam Shields, special to Nunatsiaq News)

Inuit culture, tradition and life in the North hit the big screen at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre Monday evening.

A near-capacity crowd was on hand for a Toronto International Film Festival screening of Zacharias Kunuk’s Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband).

After 100 minutes of rapt silence, occasionally punctured by peals of laughter, the audience applauded for four minutes straight.

Tyler Akeeagok, a Toronto-based Inuk who attended the show, said the film makes him miss his homeland.

“When you’ve lived down here, you miss being around other Inuit,” he said.

“You miss hearing Inuktitut, you miss looking at the land from back home. You just miss that environment where you feel like you are your true self.”

Wrong Husband is a love story set 4,000 years ago, in an era of arranged marriages.

The vast land, sky and water of Igloolik Island provide the backdrop for Kunuk’s characters to navigate the human complexities of family dynamics alongside shamans and other elements of traditional Inuit culture.

Kunuk, who hosted a question-and-answer session after the screening, has said he wants his films to serve as a record of Inuit culture. He has earned international praise with his work, notably with the 2001 film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.

Sheila Kalinovits, a Toronto-based Inuk who grew up in Iqaluit, showed up to the screening in traditional Inuit snow goggles and contemporary Inuit earrings.

“My heart is pounding because it was incredible. I can’t stop crying because of seeing the Inuk representation that we didn’t have for so long,” she said of the film.

“We deserve our stories to be told: people who live on Indigenous land don’t know these stories. But at the same time, I didn’t know these stories. My mother went to residential school and didn’t pass on stories at all. I don’t know my mother’s history.”

Some members of the audience said the film gave a connection to a heritage that can simultaneously feel deeply personal and sometimes at arm’s length — familiar yet unfamiliar.

During the question-and-answer session, one audience member said, “The story was 4,000 years ago yet here we are and really relate.”

Authenticity was central to the film’s development. It has an Inuktitut script and a cast of mostly non-professional Inuit actors.

Kunuk said the film’s stars were recruited by various means, including through radio and directly from a local high school. The film was shot on location in Igloolik.

The score was composed by Piqsiq, an Inuit throat singing duo of two sisters. They used instruments and objects from Igloolik such as rocks, sealskin, bones and a harp fashioned from caribou antler, skin and skull.

The cast, crew, and producers of “Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband)” take questions from the audience Monday evening during a question-and-answer session after the movie’s screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. (Photo by Sam Shields, special to Nunatsiaq News)

One audience member said to Kunuk, the cast and crew, “You brought out the stories I grew up with.”

There are two more screenings of Wrong Husband scheduled during the Toronto International Film Festival. The first on Tuesday is at 2:30 p.m. and the second, on Sept. 14, is at 9:30 a.m.

Viewers in Iqaluit will get the chance to see Wrong Husband on Friday at 6:45 p.m. Entrance to the Iqaluit screening is free.