Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

NNSL (Feb 22/99) - In the last 10 years, Igloolik Isuma Productions -- Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn and Paulossie Qulitalik -- have proven themselves prolific, with at least 20 videos under their belts.

Numerous awards have been won and prestigious institutions sport Isuma productions in their collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York University National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Northern Peoples in Hokaido, Japan, to name just a few. And just lately, the National Film Board has kicked in funds so that Isuma can proceed with a planned television feature, Antanajuat (The Fast Runner).

"The National Film Board is in this year, so we're planning ahead," says Kunuk, who has been written up in many newspapers. "Just before Christmas they telephoned us and said they're in for serious, $450,000 to be paid over a three-year period. And we have a proposal in to Telefilm Canada for part of the budget."

Not bad for a videographer whose home town only got television in 1982 --the elders kept it out until the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation was formed -- and who was a carver by trade.

"In Repulse Bay I saw a video camera and I decided to have one too. I brought some carvings down to Montreal, sold them, and bought my first TV set, 26 inch, a porta pack and camera, and a VCR."

And he's never looked back. Kunuk does admit that he didn't know what he was getting into.

Preparations for Antanajuat are moving apace.

"I have all the actors. I have 35 actors, 42 including children, and with extras, maybe 47. That's what we're doing right now, organising all the actors."

"Actors" in Isuma productions are usually Igloolik residents.

Kunuk is happy to have finally managed some of the financing for the film that he has been planning for some time. Asked how long he'd been working on Antanajuat and how long until it would be completed, Kunuk said:

"Maybe '96. Hopefully if everything goes well, by the year 2000, April, we'll have it finished."

This particular film with be somewhat different from its predecessors. All Kunuk's films go back in time -- recording a history that never has been recorded -- but this one goes way, way back.

"We're staging Antanajuat in the 16th century. We'll have no rifles, no metal," explains Kunuk. "Only bone and ivory and rock. The sleds are made out of whale bone. We made one of the sleds out of walrus hide. What we do is we freeze it and make it into a sled. All the clothing is caribou and seal. The goggles are bone. All their tools -- the closest to metal is rock, rock ulus. Cooking pots in stone and kudluks in stone, everything. That's what we've been working on these years."

The film will tell the story of the two brothers of a poor, outcast family, Amaqjuat and Antanajuat -- the fast runner of the title.

Antanajuat takes a woman, Atuat, who has been promised to another. "When these golden rules are laid out, nobody breaks them... Even if this woman gets another husband, the promised husband gets to take her," says Kunuk about the way thing were -- and will be on video.