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When Zacharias Kunuk won the Camera d’or for best first feature at Cannes in 2001, he was hailed as Canada’s next great director.
A somewhat surprising star from a remote corner of Nunavut, Kunuk saw his haunting film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner go on to win worldwide acclaim, pulling in a host of awards, including the best Canadian feature at the Toronto International Film Festival that year and best feature at the 2002 Genie Awards.
The mythic tale of blood, love and revenge in the Far North has been billed as the first feature film written and shot entirely in Inuktitut and is considered by some critics to be one of the best films ever made in Canada. Atanarjuat helped garner Kunuk an Order of Canada in 2002 and vaulted him and co-producer Norman Cohn into the limelight, allowing them to make many more films, all focused on the North.
But their artistic success didn’t bring financial success and their company, Igloolik Isuma Productions, has had to pull the plug.
After struggling for years, Isuma has been forced to file for receivership in Quebec, citing roughly $750,000 in debts. The move was imposed in late May by a Nunavut investment firm, Atuqtuarvik, which lent the company $500,000 in 2009.
The receivership ends a remarkable film venture that began more than 20 years ago when Cohn, a filmmaker from Montreal, met Kunuk, a Inuit videographer from Igloolik, Nunavut. “The interests we had fit together in a way that produced the results,” said Cohn. “As a small Inuit-language film company, it’s a miracle we were in business for 20 years in the first place.”
Read the full Globe and Mail article
For more information on Igloolik Isuma Productions consult Isuma by Michael Evan. In Isuma, the author explores multiple aspects of the production company's filmmaking, including its cultural and political stances, its embrace of folklore and respect for ancestors, and its role in the Arctic community of Igloolik.
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