• PROGRAMME
• SYNOPSES
• JURY
• WINNERS
• CALL FOR ENTRIES
• GALLERY

Nanook of the North

1. Original Title: Nanook of the North
2. Author: Robert Flaherty
3. Director: Robert Flaherty
4. Screenplay: Robert Flaherty
5. Editor: Robert Flaherty
6. Photography: Robert Flaherty
7. Commento/Narration
   Carl Stearns Clancy
8. Starring:
   Nanook, sua moglie Nyla e altri indigeni
9. USA
10. 55 min.
11. 1922

“How about picking your average Eskimo and his family and filming their life for a whole year? […] Here is a man who has fewer resouces than any other inhabitant of the Earth, (who) is entirely dependent on what he can kill or capture - all the while fighting that most terrible of tyrants, the harsh Northern climate […]. I honestly thought it might make a captivating story.” The producers must have disagreed, though, since the only funds for the film came from a fur-making company in Northern Canada. But for Flaherty, cinema is the by-product of another passion: exploration. Nanook of the North, the first title in a collection that features jewels like Man of Aran, The Land, Louisiana Story, will be remembered as the prototype of ethnographic documentaries, inspired by a desire to show real people rather than characters on the silver screen, filmed under the same, extremely harsh conditions the inhabitants of those regions have to put up with (the temperature sometimes fell to minus 40 degrees Centigrade in the Hudson Bay area). With little experience and using the cumbersome Akeley cameras of the time, Flaherty filmed sequences of classical and grand simplicity, based on the real environment he himself was experiencing. Shown as dry and bare as can be - even if the alleged ‘doctoring’ of a few scenes raised some criticism among die-hard supporters of cinéma vérité - the Inuits’ everyday struggle for survival turns into a universal drama.