Aka Hansen
b. 1987 Nuuk, Greenland —
Growing up between Denmark and Greenland, Nuuk-based Aka Hansen cannot remember a time that she did not want to have a camera in her hand, and she has since become a trailblazing member of the country’s new generation of emerging filmmakers. “I make films that I really want to see, because nobody else is making them here,” Hansen says. Following her success in
2009 with the first exclusively Greenlandic-language film Hinnarik Sinnattunilu, Hansen produced Qaqqat Alanngui (2011), which tells the story of a group of friends on a graduation trip to a summer cabin who become the target of a qivittoq— a hermit that has acquired supernatural powers while living in isolation on the land.
Most recently, she wrote and produced the pilot episode for the science fiction web series Polar (2017), which screened at the 2018 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and is in the process of planning a documentary centred on her uncle and his experiences searching for his Danish father. While much of Hansen’s work is made with a Greenlandic audience in mind, her more personal exploration in Half and Half (2016) has appealed equally to international viewers. “I wanted to talk about the people that are mixed, or in between, or outside the boxes that we want to put each other in.” The short explores her blended heritage through contrasting scenes of the director in Greenland, donning traditional attire, and then moving mechanically through an unnamed Danish city. “I think my next projects will be more ‘inside out’,” she muses, “coming from here and going out into the world to tell a story about us. It’s time for that now.” – Emily Henderson