Biographies

Producer ... Director ... Co-Writer ... Co-editor

ZACHARIAS KUNUK is producer/director of Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), his first dramatic feature film. He is also president and co-founder of Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc., Canada’s first Inuit-owned independent production company. Born in a sod house on the arctic tundra in 1957, Kunuk was nine years old when his family gave up their nomadic lifestyle and settled in the new Baffin Island government town of Igloolik. In 1981, already a famous carver, Kunuk sold three sculptures in Montreal and brought home the arctic’s first video camera to a community that did not yet have television. As director in the Isuma production team Kunuk’s credits include the short dramas Qaggiq (Gathering Place, 1989), Nunaqpa (Going Inland, 1991) Saputi (Fish Traps, 1993) and Nunavut (Our Land, 1995), and documentaries Nipi (Voice, 1999) and Nanugiurutiga (My First Bear, 2001), shown in festivals and museums in sixteen countries with personal presentations at National Gallery of Canada, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and artist-in-residencies at several Canadian universities.

Producer ... Scriptwriter

PAUL APAK ANGILIRQ (1954-1998) began his television career in 1978 as one of the first trainees in Canada’s effort to develop indigenous television producers in remote Aboriginal communities. Hired at the start of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in 1981, Apak received IBC’s Special Recognition Award when he left in 1992 to become vice-president and co- founder of Igloolik Isuma Productions. An experienced adventurer, Apak filmed
Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) two ground-breaking expeditions: The Qidlarsuaaq Expedition retracing by dog team a 19th century migration of Igloolik Inuit to northern Greenland; and Through Eskimo Country, a voyage by walrus-hide boat from Siberia to Alaska over the pre-historic migratory route through the Bering Strait. Apak wrote the Inuktitut screenplay for Atanarjuat but passed away from cancer in December 1998 before the film was completed.

Producer ... Cinematographer/DP ... Co-Writer ... Co-editor ... Prodn Manager

NORMAN COHN is secretary-treasurer, the fourth co-founder and the only non-Inuit on Isuma’s collective ownership team. Living in Igloolik since 1985, Cohn is Isuma's director of photography in a fifteen-year collaboration with Zacharias Kunuk and Paul Apak that created Isuma’s style of ‘re-lived' cultural drama. Before coming to Igloolik Cohn was a widely-exhibited video artist. The solo exhibition, Norman Cohn: Portraits, opened in 1983 at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery and other Canadian museums, and Cohn’s experimental feature documentary Quartet for Deafblind (1987) was selected for Dokumenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. Winner of numerous Canada Council Awards and a 1990 Guggenheim Fellowship, Cohn was co-winner with Kunuk of the 1994 Bell Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Video Art.