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Isuma presents in the Canada Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, 2019
In today’s contentious global media environment, when millions of people have been driven from their homes worldwide, Isuma media art sees the forced relocation of families from an Inuit point of view. The video installation One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk recreates an encounter on Baffin Island in April 1961 when one Inuit family was ordered to move off the land. From the same place, 58 years later, Isuma webcasts Silakut Live from the Floe Edge as a multinational mining company plans a railroad and supertanker shipping past today’s Inuit communities of Igloolik and Pond Inlet.
Isuma Video on Demand
Isuma’s exhibition in cyberspace presents a collection of Isuma and other indigenous-language films on iTunes in 30 countries with subtitles in English, Italian, French, Spanish and German, including Atanarjuat The Fast Runner (Cannes Camera d’Or 2001); The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (opening film at 2006 Toronto International Film Festival); Before Tomorrow (by Igloolik’s Arnait women’s collective); Edge of the Knife, the world’s first feature film in the Haida language; and One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk.
Isuma
ISUMA, meaning ‘to think,’ is a collective of Inuit-owned related companies based since 1990 in Igloolik, Nunavut with a southern office in Montreal. In January 1990 four partners Zacharias Kunuk, Paul Apak, Pauloosie Qulitalik and Norman Cohn incorporated Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc. to produce and distribute independent Inuit-language films and media art from an Inuit point of view, featuring local actors recreating Inuit life in the Igloolik region in the 1930s and 1940s. Over the next ten years Isuma helped establish an Inuit media arts centre, NITV; a youth media and circus group, Artcirq; and a women's video collective, Arnait Video Productions. In 2001, Isuma’s first feature-length drama, Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, won the Camera d’or at the Cannes Film Festival; Isuma’s second feature, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, opened the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. In 2004 Isuma incorporated Isuma Distribution International and in 2008 launched IsumaTV www.isuma.tv, the world’s first website for Indigenous media art now showing over 7,000 films and videos in 84 languages. In 2010, Igloolik Isuma Productions closed and re-opened as Kingulliit Productions; in 2012 Kingulliit and Isuma Distribution produced Digital Indigenous Democracy, an internet network to inform and consult Inuit in low-bandwidth communities facing development of the Baffinland Iron Mine; and in 2014, My Father’s Land, a non-fiction feature about what took place during this Baffinland intervention. Recent projects include the feature drama, Maliglutit (Searchers), the TV series, Hunting With My Ancestors, and the world’s first Haida-language feature film, SGaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the Knife). Isuma's 30-year media art project represented Canada at the 2019 Venice Biennale with its newest feature, One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, which then screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and won Best Canadian Film at the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival. Contact info@isuma.tv.
The Fast Runner Trilogy
Three unique Inuit films: Atanarjuat The Fast Runner; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen; and Before Tomorrow, express the dramatic history of one of the world’s oldest oral cultures from it’s own point of view. “A masterpiece... The first national cinema of the 21st century.” – A.O. Scott, NY Times review of Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, 2002.
Tungijuq
Internationally renowned Inuit throat-singer Tanya Tagaq, and Cannes-winning filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, talk back to the anti seal-hunting lobby, in this thought-provoking and meditative short film, on the seal-hunt and what it means to the traditional way of life of the Inuit.
Igloolik Television - Channel 51
Igloolik is an island in the Nunavut territory of the Canadian Arctic, with a population of approximately 2000 Inuit. It is where Isuma, the first independent Inuit film production company, was born. Media is distributed online on IsumaTV and, through the Mediaplayer Network, broadcasted on the community channel in every home television in Igloolik.
Virtual Museum
Kingulliit" refers to the generation of Inuits born in the first thirty years of the 20th century. They were called the "next generation" because they were the first in centuries to confront a world fundamentally different from the unchanging and known world mastered by countless generations since time immemorial. Kingulliit passed from antiquity to the modern era - from Stone Age to Digital Age - in a single lifetime: starting with Christianity and trade, followed by government, police, settlements, money, schooling, broadcasting, computers and finally, 2.0 global Internet.
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