SEE PAST CUTE SEALS
Angry Inuk film fights back
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril grew up eating seal meat. While her parents worked, she would get dropped at her grandparents’ house, where only Inuktitut was spoken. She has memories of going on “many, many, many, many, many” seal hunts with her family and of eating seal meat fresh on the spot in the snow. Those excursions, often led by her hunter grandfather, were a part of normal life.
“It’s a rude awakening when you realize it’s not normal for everybody and millions of people out there judge you and think of you as less human for eating food right outside your door,” Arnaquq-Baril said via Skype last week from Iqaluit, Nunavut.
The Inuit filmmaker was back home for a few days between festival appearances in Biarritz, France; Santa Barbara, Calif.; the Yukon; and Berlin, where next month her pro-sealing documentary Angry Inuk will screen as part of the prestigious Berlinale.
The film premièred last spring as part of Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, where it won the audience award; was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September and recently won the people’s choice award at Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival, a touring showcase of TIFF’s favourite Canadian features from the previous year; and screened at the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal, winning the Women Inmates Award and the Magnus Isacsson Award.
Produced by the National Film Board of Canada in collaboration with Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm, Angry Inuk confronts the decades-long campaign by ecological and animal rights groups against sealing, showing the impact such initiatives have had on Inuit communities by taking away a primary source of income.
“I remember when I was young, hearing older people talk about Greenpeace and anti-sealers with frustration,” Arnaquq-Baril said, “not really understanding who they were talking about, but knowing there were people out there who see seal hunters as bad people.
“It took a long time to understand why we (the Inuit) were so unimportant to the outside world. We were more casualties of that battle. It wasn’t until I started making this film that I realized how clearly animal rights groups knew we were being affected.”
Arnaquq-Baril initially wanted to call her film War With Greenpeace, in reference to the NGO’s long-standing use of the seal hunt as an important fundraising tool. She uncovers a 1978 interview with former Greenpeace core member Paul Watson, who admits that although they’re misleading, anti-sealing campaigns bring in big bucks.
The sealing protest movement all but shut down the trade in 1983, when the Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community banned imports of harp seal pup skins. The decision led to harsh financial times for the Inuit, who make up the majority of seal hunters, according to Arnaquq-Baril.
And yet dominant images of the practice have portrayed it as a brutal industrial enterprise, downplaying or outright ignoring Inuit involvement.
“The tactics animal rights groups have used to silence the Inuit are mind-blowing,” the director said. “They’re quite fluent and very smart with public relations and they’re very careful with semantics. They’ve been very successful in leveraging campaigns with celebrities into donations and very careful to portray themselves as the little guy — these little NGOs against this huge commercial industry. In fact, animal rights groups have hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and (reap significant) revenues every year, even though there are only a few hundred commercial seal hunters in Canada, while in the North there are thousands of Inuit hunters.”
Eight years in the making, Angry Inuk brings viewers behind the scenes to show seal hunting as an integral aspect of Inuit culture in which all parts of the animal are used. Seal meat feeds entire communities, while the pelts, when they can be sold — and despite their long-ago plummeted prices — provide money for gas and other necessities.
Inuk lawyer, sealskin clothing designer and activist Aaju Peter is one of Arnaquq-Baril’s main subjects and was originally going to be her film’s lone central figure until the director found herself becoming increasingly involved in the cause.
“This film really turned me into an activist,” she said.
“It politicized me and made me understand the dynamics more. I was going to document (Peter’s) life’s work, in the past and on a continuing basis. Then at some point, I became part of the team advocating on the issue. To maintain my integrity, I had to be honest that I was part of the activism and step in front of the camera. It wasn’t an easy choice.”
Putting the director onscreen is tricky to pull off in documentary and is often frowned upon as it can make the handling of the topic appear less objective. Add to that the controversial subject matter and you have a film that could go either way with audiences.
“I’m not a nervous public speaker,” Arnaquq-Baril said, “but I was terrified for the first screening in Toronto (at Hot Docs). I had no idea how people would react. I was scared people wouldn’t get it. The screening was packed; it was completely sold out in this huge theatre. When the audience jumped to its feet and roared, I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘I never imagined that I would look at crowds of hundreds of people in the south, thousands of kilometres from my home in the north, and be understood.’ And I sobbed.”