Iqaluit (Mar 08/04) - A museum in the U.S. has turned up a film of Pond Inlet from the 1940s.

Genevieve LeMoine of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum in Maine said they discovered the film while digitizing their fragile film archives.

"The film archive has been closed for decades," said LeMoine.

The museum was unable to provide researchers access to many films because of preservation issues.

The film itself, a 16-mm colour Kodachrome, is too fragile to be projected and was being wound through a hand crank viewer by an archivist who realized the significance of its content and contacted the public library in Pond Inlet.

LeMoine hasn't viewed the rediscovered images, but expects the film would be like others shot by MacMillan of people on shore and people visiting the boat he was travelling on. MacMillan made many trips to the Arctic following his journey to the North Pole with Robert Peary. The people are usually easily identifiable, she said.

"Sometimes he would show movies on the boat (to the visitors)," she said.

Pond Inlet librarian Phillipa Ootoova said they had been approached to see if the community would be interested in seeing the film.

"We would like to have it," said Ootoova. "It would be nice to have a showing for the elders and family members who are in the film."

The film will be sent out to a lab to be digitized onto tape.

Then the museum will download it onto its computer hard drive and eventually burn it onto a DVD.

Donald MacMillan travelled with Robert Peary on his 1908 polar expedition, though MacMillan never actually reached the North Pole.

He and Peary were old friends, and both were graduates of Bowdoin College, where the Peary-MacMillan Arctic museum was founded to house their collection of photographs, film and artifacts.

MacMillan mostly filmed communities in Greenland and Labrador, making the Pond Inlet film a rarity in the archive. LeMoine said there is also a black and white film of Cape Dorset Macmillan shot in the 1920s.

The U.S. may seem a far-off place to house artifacts of Arctic exploration, but as LeMoine said, "Well, it is Maine."

-- with files from Neils Christensen