How Zacharias Kunuk Makes Us Listen to the Inuit Voices

'We have no other choice, we have to listen,’ says a mother to her daughter in Zacharias Kunuk’s Wrong Husband (Uiksaringitara, 2025). The daughter, named Kaujak, cannot marry the man she wants and instead has to accept another suitor’s forceful proposal. There are many layers of listening that play out in Kunuk’s oeuvre. It is listening to the Inuit community, to its elders, peers and youth; but it is also listening to record the oral stories and myths so as to preserve them for future generations. Kunuk himself describes his method as ‘reverse anthropology’, reverting the gaze of the coloniser and reclaiming their own stories. ‘Method’ may not be the word Kunuk would use. When he talks about filmmaking, he is succinct and keeps circling back to the point, which has remained the same for 40 years of his career: the utmost dedication to Nunavut and its people.

The first Inuit filmmaker and certainly the first to win the Camera d’Or for the best first feature at Cannes for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), Kunuk lives and works in Igloolik, a hamlet of around 2000 people in Nunavut, northern Canada. It is so cold there that Kunuk joked that it feels like spring in Berlin right now (-9). Kunuk was in his twenties when television came to Igloolik (the community actually voted against it till the late 1970s). As a child, he lived off the land, on Baffin Island, with his family in a sod house. Kunuk remembers helping his father with dog-teams and making harpoons. After moving to Igloolik, he learnt English and a craft: he started making soap sculptures, which he later sold to buy his first camera. Westerns became the community’s favourite genre: cowboys vs. Indians, revenge stories, lots of action, and straightforward storytelling. John Wayne is Kunuk’s personal favourite, to whom he would later pay homage in his revisionist take Searches (2016). In fact, Kunuk amusingly notes that the Inuit have been telling similar stories for centuries.

Inuit culture is oral. The seed of many stories is a conflict between good and evil, the bad guy steals the good guy’s wife, so the good guy seeks retribution and gets it. After the screening of Wrong Husband, here at the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section, I logged on to my Letterboxd account to see some fresh takes, and some disappointing reviews came up: ‘flat’, ‘lengthy’, ‘slow’. But this is precisely why I find his filmmaking brilliant–it is the filmmaking of retelling, not even revisionist, but honest. The vision of The Fast Runner came about because Kunuk had heard stories about a naked man running in the snow, and that is what the film is about. You break promises, bad things happen. You steal someone’s wife, well, get ready to be on the run. In describing Kunuk’s work I hesitate to use terms like ‘visual grammar’ or ‘cinematic vernacular’ because they seem to apply a semiotic reading that simply does not work, or rather, would not do it justice. What I want instead is to approximate the authenticity Kunuk is after. He prefers a wide-angle lens to capture the vastness of the Arctic tundra, tracking shots to better portray the movement of sleds and people running for their lives. The soundscape is often composed of Inuit throat singing, a statement in and out of itself. An endangered practice, throat singing–hypnotic and resonant–reclaims an ancestral identity. In Wrong Husband, Kunuk collaborates with Tanya Tagaq, a Nunavut native throat singer who sings in Inuktitut. Her trance-like guttural chanting emphasises the moments of suspense, an old trick that works like magic.

To my embarrassment, I only learnt about Kunuk while preparing for Berlinale Talents. Seeing 'Indigenous filmmaking' in the title of the talk piqued my curiosity and I immediately signed up for “Stories from Igloolik: Indigenous Voices in Cinema” and put on Searches. I had expected to see a postcolonial narrative, such as those of Ousmane Sembène or Djibril Diop Mambéty, but Kunuk’s cinema turned out to be something completely different, very elemental in fact—stripped down to its bones, in Searches I saw a bedtime story come to life. This has been Kunuk’s approach to storytelling: visualising stories passed down by the elders.

In my doctoral research, I am looking at what I call the ‘more-than-human cinema’, films that reject, subvert or question the anthropocentric status quo. Think mycelium rather than an iceberg, rhizome rather than a mountain. Cinema is often compared to exploration or climbing; it is the vision of a singular individual, a very Western ideal of self-actualisation. Kunuk fits in my corpus of more-than-human filmmakers, which also includes Ana Vaz and Michelangelo Frammartino, for example. It is the filmmaking that embeds the human in the fabric of the more-than-human life; that highlights the inevitable interconnectedness of humans with many forms of being; that underscores mutual dependence, co-evolvement and co-existence. Ecology and nature become essential signifiers in relating to cinema, not as culture, but as Donna Haraway would say, as ‚naturecultures’.

When it comes to indigenous cinema, it is de facto more-than-human cinema. Very often Kunuk recreates the legends of the past like in Wrong Husband, where the story is set 4000 years ago. There was definitely no way to escape nature! Kunuk’s attention to detail, such as caribou suits, igloos and dog sleds, are not only interesting to observe on screen, but they transcend the screen and become the community work. Kunuk is an elder himself now, therefore, he works with young people from Igloolik who learn how to make the things that were so essential for living in the Arctic. They also act in the films and speak Inuktitut. In 1990, Kunuk along with Paul Apak Angilirq, Norman Cohn and Paulossie Qulitalik, founded his production company, Igloolik Isuma Productions, which has its own channel Isuma TV, with loads of free content in Inuktitut.

During the talk at HAU 2, Kunuk said: ‘We [the Inuit] haven’t changed for 4000 years, why should we change now? Because some people came and wanted us to adopt their religion?’ This sentiment runs through many indigenous practices whose knowledge of the world and nature has been deemed irrelevant. During the talk, Kunuk spoke of climate scientists who come to Nunavut to measure the rate at which ice is melting, and who do not engage with the local community, who, in fact, haptically experience the changes in temperature. Listening courageously is precisely about that, about listening to those who have been there before. It is tempting to label Kunuk’s practice as visual anthropology, but it is more than that. Kunuk is a lore keeper, a guardian of myths and a chronicler of the Inuit life.