Live from the North
Isuma.tv takes indigenous film online
BY Stephanie Silliker
Photography courtesy Isuma.tv
In 1981, Canadian Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk sold three of his soapstone carvings in Montreal and bought a video camera with the proceeds, bringing the new technology home to the Arctic. Today, 27 years, dozens of fi lms and one Cannes Film Festival medal later, Kunuk, along with Igloolik Isuma Productions, is bringing the Arctic to the world.
Kunuk and his partner Norman Cohn are the masterminds behind Isuma.tv, the latest wave in online video sharing. Named for the Inuktitut word for “to think,” Isuma.tv allows indigenous filmmakers from around the world to upload their films for free. Think of it as an indigenous YouTube, but with a key difference. “A lot of what appears on YouTube is vulgar, silly and irrelevant,” says Cohn. “We are using the same technological energy as YouTube, but we’re adding purpose.”
Kunuk and Cohn saw a niche for indigenous cinema following the success of their 2001 work Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the first Inuktitut-language film to come out of Canada, which won a medal at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. The difficulty facing Aboriginal film, in their eyes, is not a lack of talent but rather a lack of an accessible platform where it can shine.“We want to push a wedge into a crack in the world-media system that has kept the Aboriginal people at the very bottom of the ladder,” says Cohn.
Launched in December 2007, Isuma.tv already hosts a variety of channels that showcase everything from a fi lm about a young Sámi woman living in Stockholm trying to learn her native language, to the full-length version of Cohn and Kunuk’s latest feature film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.
Tanya Tagaq Gillis, a leading Inuit throat singer, best known for her collaborations with Björk, says Isuma. tv can be an invaluable way to get indigenous art out into the world.
“There is a deep subculture of Aboriginal talent that isn’t necessarily surfacing,” says Tagaq. “Isuma.tv is a way for those artists to get exposed.”
On June 21, Isuma.tv will again forge ahead into uncharted territory.
Airing from the land of the midnight sun, Isuma.tv will do a live webcast of the Fibonacci Project, a collaboration between three world-class circus companies that’s part of the Alianait Arts Festival in Iqaluit, Nunavut. It’s the first time the Alianait Arts Festival will be connected live to the world via the web, and the first time anyone has webcast an event live from Nunavut’s capital.
For Kunuk, the webcast will in some ways be the culmination of a number of projects. One of the circus troupes, Artcirq, is an Inuit youth performance company that Kunuk helped get off the ground in 1998, after the tiny population of his hometown of Igloolik was devastated by the suicides of two of its youth.
Webcasting live from the arts festival is also a way of showing the vitality of indigenous culture.
“The Aboriginal experience is not just a nostalgic past,” says Cohn. “We are putting a window on contemporary indigenous reality.” Through Isuma.tv, the ancient indigenous practice of storytelling fi nds an unlikely home in the modern art of global video sharing. And now the whole world can watch.
