Searchers

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Saturday, February 11th, 2017
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM

In 2001, unknown Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk took the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, based on a 500-year-old Inuit story about betrayal and exile. His latest, Maliglutit, draws not on Inuit stories but rather on the 1956 John Ford film The Searchers, a traditional cowboy movie. Not just a remake, Kunuk’s latest work has added mythical and spiritual components that take it far beyond the genre and layer it with nuance and humanity.

One night, an elder banishes four fierce hunters who resent having to provide for the other members of the family and aggressively make moves on the others’ wives. Returning from a caribou hunt, the elder, Kuanana, (Benjamin Kunuk) and his son Siku (Joseph Uttak) discover that his wife, Ailla (Jocelyne Immaroitok), and daughter, Tagaq (Karen Ivalu), have been kidnapped and the rest of his family murdered. As Kuanana sets out on a journey to find his family and punish the perpetrators, his father's spirit helper, the loon Kallulik, guides him on his mission to overturn fate and reunite his family. Kunuk, as always, presents a powerful and authentic voice in a land of unforgiving isolation.