Comment

A wonderful and profound work on the conplex relations between a territory and its people.
– Trento Film Festival, Italy

The film, which features stunning visuals of the frozen north, as well as extended scenes of seal slaughter and touching interviews with Inuit mothers, is not unprovocative. I was hypnotized by its visuals. Yet, in dramatizing its narrative, the film works with certain tropes of indigenous peoples, in particular their putative ‘remoteness’ and their concomitant ‘purity,’ that critiques of ethnographic pastoralism have long called into question. At the same time, however, the film reflexively positions these exoticisms through the visual device of long shots of medieval maps, which represented the barbarous ends of the earth as populated by monsters and other frightening figures. So if the film reproduces a story about the loss of a kind of noble ‘elementary’ or ‘primitive’ existence through the spread of global pollution, it does so by asking the viewer to be explicit about the assumptions of that story. The film is a fascinating text exhibiting many contemporary anxieties: the fear that globalization will result in the loss of cultural diversity, the fear that the environment has been permanently polluted, the fear of loss of biodiversity. The isomorphic equation between the loss of traditions and loss of ‘nature’ is a provocative and fascinating aspect of contemporary zeitgeist. Yet, Mortimer is clear that her intention is not to make an ethnographic film.
– Thomas Strong (University of Helsinki Social and Cultural Anthropology)

This film is a fascinating documentary–art film hybrid, which opens with the discovery that breast milk in the Arctic contains levels of PCBs seven times higher than global average, and it tries to trace the origins of that contamination. Along the way we discover much that is fascinating about Inuit practices relating to (amongst other things) food, mothering and song/poetry, and we are encouraged to reflect on the numerous, invisible chemicals that we encounter everyday, and the 'interconnectedness of all things'.
– Dr Claire Thomson (UCL Scandinavian Studies)

Stunning portrait of Inuit life that questions how we live in the world today. Part environmental expose and part art film, this powerful crossover piece flies in the face of conventional documentary making methods.
– Birds Eye View Film Festival, London