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News
Back to News listing Montreal Gazette, Friday, January 19, 2001 Inuit finally get to tell their own stories in Imax production and in Inuktitut-language When the snow falls and Arctic winds howl, the idea of the North stirs anew in every Canadian soul. But whose idea? That of the explorers from the south, or of the people who have lived in the Arctic for thousands of years? Since Robert J. Flaherty invented the documentary with Nanook of the North (1921), the Inuit have had little to say about how they're portrayed in the movies. Until very recently, the natives have lacked the cultural resources to tell their own story on the big screen in their own language. Great North, a 70-minute Imax spectacular, which opens in Montreal
on Feb. 9, enlists Nanook's grandson, Adamie Inukpuk, to guide directors
Martin J. Dignard and William Reeve across the frozen vastness. The word from Isuma is that the feature with a cast of Inuit actors directed by Zacharias Kunuk from a script written by the late Paul Apak Angilirq will make its debut in the south this spring, at a major international festival still to be chosen. The National Film Board, which contributed $450,000 and technical support for the Atanarjuat project, is marking the second anniversary ofthe founding of Nunavut, April 1, with a package of 60 videos containing 107 films on life in the Arctic, made between 1942 and 1996. The entire 60-pack sells for $1,499.95 and is available as single videotapes ($39.95) or in thematic series, like the 5-volume Inuit Arts ($179.95) or the 9-volume Charting the North ($315.95.). For a free catalogue, call (514) 283-9000, or check out the series on NFB's Web site: www.nfb.ca/incelebrationofnunavut. Earliest Inuit art is the subject of an ongoing exhibition - Lost Visions, Forgotten Dreams: Life and Art of an Ancient Arctic People - at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. Call (514) 398-7100. The other end of the world is just as cool and Antarctic exploration gets the big-feature treatment in Shackleton, a four-hour movie being made by the A&E network. It stars Kenneth Branagh as Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole aboard a ship aptly named Endurance was a heroic failure. - - - They'll teach the world to sing: When The King passed on in 1977,
he left behind 35 Elvis impersonators. A decade later, there were
1,000 of them and more than 10,000 as of 1997. The latest count
stands at 35,000. Paget made the forecast after he traveled America for a year documenting the demographic phenomenon for his movie, Almost Elvis. For excerpts from Almost Elvis, tune your desktop theatre to Web site: www.ElvisImpersonators.com. - - - Cultural crosscurrents: If those movie-ad blurbs are to be believed, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is synonymous with Best Picture. The Michelle Yeoh-Chow Yun Fat martial arts thriller/love story is kicking up a box-office storm in North America and in Europe, but it's getting the boot in Asia. For Chinese audiences, high-flying kung-fu action is hardly a novelty act. Raised on blood-spattered chop-socky, they're finding director Ang Lee's restrained treatment too polite. In view of this startling cultural-wars dispatch, the possible Hollywood remake of Crouching Tiger by uber producer Jerry Bruckheimer, with Angelina Jolie and Tom Cruise, makes a lot more sense than it did last week. American-style Crouching Angelina, Hidden Tom, might be just the ticket for film-goers in Bejing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. No word yet on who'd reprise the Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung romantic pas de deux in a Hollywood remake of In the Mood for Love, which will run at Ex-Centris Feb. 16 to March 29. The Hong Kong production was one of the finest flicks made anywhere last year, a beautifully realized, impressionistic 1960s period piece. |
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