No long goodbyes

My travelling baby Hector and I left the filming camp at Siuraarjuk late last week. A two-day break was called for cast and crew, so we prepped ourselves for another qamutiq ride back across the sea ice to Igloolik.

This time, I borrowed Bonnie's purple amautiq and carried Hector myself. ... [read more]

Day three out at Siuraarjuk. The shooting call was scheduled for 3 pm, just as the sun was starting to lower in the sky and the light was becoming more diffuse. The plan was to shoot outdoor scenes of life in the camps. Rhoda, the camp babysitter and extra for the movie had offered to take little Hector for the ... [read more]

Finding Hector a hood

Today was expedition day. The production is shifting from shooting indoor scenes in sets built around the settlement to shooting outdoor scenes at a location “away from it all”. A convoy of Isuma cast and crew was to depart at 2 pm and travel 2-3 hours by snowmobile and sled ... [read more]

Today was the start of filming at the set designed to be George Washington Cleveland's trading post. Cleveland was an ex-whaler who, at the end of the whaling period in the Eastern Arctic, decided to stay in the Igloolik region and run an independent trading post. There he collected fox furs and exchanged them for flour, ... [read more]

Filming shamanic rituals

Today is the day that the crew and actors are filming the tiviaq ritual scene inside the snowhouses. Inuit were formerly a nomadic people. Throughout much of the year they travelled in small extended or nuclear family groups. People would go without seeing their family members and ... [read more]

The idea of a blog

OK, so blogging is a brand new thing for me. I am a university professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. I lecture in introductory anthropology and indigenous media. When I am not teaching, I try to write academic articles where I often end up writing tight, tortured prose. Academic ... [read more]