Life in a cold climate

Northern exposure: The Necessities of Life is a tale of cultural identity in a bleak landscape. Photo / Supplied

The connection is, to say the least, slightly dodgy. I have a mental picture of telephone wire stretching north along endless lines of poles across the frozen tundra, though the massive distances involved make that unlikely.

The other party to the phone call is in Igloolik, a village on a small island of the same name, in Nunavut, the vast northeast of Canada that was until 1999 subsumed into the Northwest Territories.

That's some kind of remote: more than 350km north of the Arctic Circle, it's a land where, except for the blink-and-you-miss-it high summer, snowmobiles are of more use than pickup trucks (and, cutely, the number plates are polar bear-shaped).

The man I want to talk to, Natar Ungalaaq, has spent the afternoon on a snowmobile, as it happens, fetching his daughter from a nearby town - a four-hour round-trip which he describes - and I can almost hear the smile in his voice - as "no roads, only trail".

The name of his hometown, Igloolik, means "there is a house there" in Inuktituk, the predominant Inuit language north of the treeline - and that's verging on a precise description.

"There's at least 1780 people here now," Ungalaaq says, and I'm not sure whether it's his halting English or a pride about the population boom that dictates his choice of phrasing.

Ungalaaq, 50, is the main character in the small but handsome French-Canadian film The Necessities of Life, which opened in Auckland this week. The handsome production focuses on an epidemic of tuberculosis that devastated the Inuit people of northern Canada in the 1950s and uses it as the basis of an intelligent and sensitive drama about how a sense of cultural identity can have a bearing on human health. To say that there is food for thought in a New Zealand setting is to state the obvious.

Ungalaaq's character, Tivii, is taken from his island home for compulsory treatment but he languishes, lonely and isolated, until an enterprising nurse comes up with a piece of lateral thinking.

The subject matter has a personal resonance for Ungalaaq who, having taken the title role in 2001's Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner, is the closest thing Nunavut has to a movie star. His grandfather was one of hundreds of Inuk who had a similar experience during the epidemic, though the actor didn't hear about it until years later, long after the old man had died.

But the subtext about cultural identity is plainly close to Ungalaaq's heart. He teaches Inuktituk at the local school and he is an artist. Once a soapstone sculptor, he now uses video as his medium - whose object is always to nurture indigenous traditions.

He has also worked on others' films about Inuit, including Kabloonak, a drama about the making of Robert Flaherty's landmark 1922 silent documentary Nanook of the North, starring Charles Dance as Flaherty.

"We do our best to keep our language alive," he says. "After all we've been speaking it for thousands of years. The Inuit languages are in danger overall but in a settlement like this we can move back and forth easily between English and Inuktituk."

The Inuk culture is big on storytelling, Ungalaaq explains, and he welcomes the application of filmmaking technology.

"Only 20 years ago we didn't have any phones or electricity. But our background is that our grandparents did a lot of storytelling and there is plenty to material there for us to work on.

"Filmmaking just gives us another way of approaching our stories. But everyone has stories, wherever you go. It's important to be able to get it out from our culture and make it accessible to others."

Ungalaaq says he was struck by the script for The Necessities of Life, by noted Quebecois filmmaker Bernard Emond, because it had "a little bit of everything".

"You can smile, you can have tears, you can laugh. You gotta smile once in a while."

The set proved something of a microcosm of the problems the film explored. Most of the script is in Quebec French - a language that Ungalaaq, like his character, does not speak. A young Inuit boy who befriends Tivii is played by an actor of Inuit descent who speaks no Inuktituk - and had to work for many days with Ungalaaq to learn his lines.

His experience is an exemplar of the dangers of cultural dislocation that increasingly threaten isolated communities particularly in mineral-rich land.

"We bump into some problems with drugs and alcohol with the young ones once in a while. We don't live in a dry area here. If you have money you can get what you want. And each day there is a flight to the capital of Nunavut and that links us to the outside world."

Lowdown

What: The Necessities of Life
Where: Rialto Newmarket
On the web: www.thenecessitiesoflife-themovie.com/