Based on an Inuit legend and made almost entirely by Inuit filmmakers, this totally absorbing 172-minute feature (2001), winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, is exciting not as ethnography but as storytelling, as drama, and as filmmaking. In this respect, one might even wind up perversely missing the exoticism and implied critique of Western values found in Nanook of the North or The Savage Innocents, but only if one insists on finding arctic natives interesting because of their relation to other cultures and not on their own terms. Certainly the plot elements are universal: sexual competition, adultery, murder, pursuit, subterfuge, and justice, all seen in relation to the needs and preservation of a particular community and way of life. This story is set at the dawn of the first millennium, but the fact that we tend to forget about historical time frames entirely while watching it is a tribute to its power to grab and hold us. Directed by Zacharias Kunuk and written by Kunuk and Paul Apak Angilirq; with Natar Ungalaaq, Sylvia Ivalu, and Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq. In Inuktitut with subtitles. (JR)