Courts d’un soir 2024: Nittaituq | Review
Nittaituq delivers a striking and anxious plea, exploring an Inuit community’s struggle to preserve its cultural identity amidst the encroaching challenges of a changing climate.
“Those changes are drastic and we don’t know what’s coming,” one can hear in the short documentary film Nittaituq, which features voices of various inhabitants spanning generations from the Inuit community of Mittimatalik, situated in the northern part of Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada.
Currently competing in the 9th edition of Montreal’s Courts d’un soir, running from April 4th to 11th, 2024, the film had its world premiere at Cinema on the Bayou in January 2024 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and was subsequently showcased at the Aulajut Nunavut International Film Festival in Iqaluit, the capital city of Nunavut.
Nittaituq is the result of collaboration between filmmaker Camille Poirier and researchers Mathilde Poirier, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at Laval University, and Flore Sergeant, holding a PhD in hydrogeology. The film gives voice to a community that has always lived in harmony with nature, in an extreme environment, but one they’ve managed to symbiotically navigate for sustenance, mobility, and child-rearing. Today, this community finds itself on the front lines of climate change, facing significant and irreversible changes that severely weaken their environment.
The ice, crucial for hunting and transportation, is thinner than ever, forming later each year and melting earlier. Caribou are becoming scarcer, and temperatures less severe. For this community intimately tied to nature, such changes significantly impact their way of life, leading to questions about their ancestral traditions of hunting, fishing, clothing making, and modes of transportation, when conditions are evolving so rapidly and drastically.
What makes the film compelling is its portrayal of how climate upheaval sets off a domino effect, risking the erosion of ancestral traditions and knowledge, thus posing a threat to the very identity and culture of this community.
Despite the poignant and anxious plea offered by the film, a glimmer of resilience emerges from the discourse, notably manifested through the adoption of new practices, such as scientific monitoring of ice layers, whose understanding becomes a crucial concern for this community and its neighboring communities.
Formally, the film’s cinematography deserves praise for its portrayal of the breathtaking landscapes of Nunavut. While it doesn’t entirely avoid the pitfall of becoming a postcard at times, it prioritizes a collection of stunning shots over direct cinema, which could have fostered even greater empathy towards the individuals it gives voice to.
In conclusion, Nittaituq echoes the timeless dance between humanity and nature, weaving a tapestry of resilience amidst the winds of change, underscoring the resilience of communities like Mittimatalik while urging for greater preservation of their environment and invaluable traditions and knowledge.
