NANOOK OF THE NORTH

The life of an Inuit family, consisting of Nanook, his wife Nyla and their children, followed during their harsh daily life, from one summer to the next, in a village near Hudson Bay. Nanook of the North, the first seminal example of documentary filmmaking capable of worldwide success, was made by explorer Robert Flaherty during two long years of travel beyond the Arctic Circle in extreme temperatures.

Halfway between an anthropological film and a didactic documentary, Flaherty ‘succeeds in giving us a description of an alternative society, fascinating and complex and not to be outdone by any other, a civilisation with its own techniques, such as the construction of an igloo, or their way of sheltering from the storm…’.

In 1994, director Claude Massot made the film Kabloonak, which tells the story of the making of the film Nanook, the friendship that developed between the American director, his host and the Inuit.