Iqaluit (Dec 04/06) - Some films live and die on details. Others are important enough to transcend them.

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, which opened nation-wide in September, but made its Nunavut debut last week, is one of the latter.

Pakak Innukshuk plays Inuit shaman Avva in the Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the latest release from Igloolik Isuma Productions. - photo courtesy of Alliance Atlantis Films

Journals is the second feature film from Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, the filmmakers behind the award-winning Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, which won the Camera D'Or for Best First Feature at Cannes and a Genie for Best Picture in 2001, among a slew of other prizes.

Like its predecessor, Journals has a raw, documentary-like quality, as cameras shake and bump into actors in cramped igluit and on bouncing dogsleds. Like Atanarjuat, the film's amateurish quality occasionally contrasts and obscures the heady themes on display.

These thoughts wash away, however, when claustrophobia meets agoraphobia head-on, as cozy igluit meet the blowing, infinite expanses of frozen tundra near Iglulik. In an instant, the characters' daily struggles for cultural (and physical) survival become crystal-clear, and the film takes on a visible and precarious vitality.

In this second film, the people of Iglulik have moved into the "modern era" of 1912, and the slow encroachment of Western culture into the high Arctic. The story is based upon the writings of famed Danish explorer Rasmussen, as he travelled with Avva, one of the last great Inuit shamans.

From the first frame, it is clear that these are a people living in two worlds. A domestic scene in an iglu fades to a photographer's black and white frame. Thimbles, metal cookware and phonographs make appearances, sharply contrasting with traditional igluit, uluit and amautit. All foreshadow a people's future, and the decisions the main characters will eventually have to make.

As Avva and his family arrive in Iglulik, the tide of Christianity has washed over the area, wiping away the "old ways." Faced with starvation, Avva's group must make the most difficult - and important - decision of their lives.

Make no mistake, this is a movie about colonialism, as sharp and biting as any committed to film. There's nothing blunt about its purpose, however; the movie is as subtle and nuanced as the process itself.

This isn't a film about war, about oppression, about genocide. It's about the difficult decisions; the hardest and smallest choices that can send an entire culture careening down the slope to an emptier, quieter future, abandoned by the spirits of the past.