Prepared by Noreen G. for the Canadian Forum, October 1994
Review and photo submitted by Sheila C.

Attending the Montreal World Film Festival in late August this year, I had the good luck to secure a ticket for Kabloonak, the remarkable Canada/France-produced film that opened the Festival itself. Even luckier for me was the fact that both filmmaker Claude Massot and lead actor Charles Dance were on hand to introduce the film, and lend a little film world glitter to the otherwise casual proceedings.

First a serious and professorial looking Massot addressed the full house, speaking in rapid French about the excitement of the project and the good fortune to have survived the hardships of filming in the frozen north of both Siberia and the Northwest Territories. Then Dance took to the microphone, tall and handsome in wrinkled linen, a professional aesthete, self-consciously awkward and charming. "I must say," he began, "that I am the victim of the English education system," an apology for not knowing how to communicate French in a city in which Jacques Parizeau had been campaigning for premier that week. Admittedly, my heart was fluttering just a little at the sight of the man whose memorable performance in "The Jewel in the Crown" had unwrapped the smoldering romance at the centre of all that colonial repression. But his confession to being linguistically challenged resonated even more meaningfully after the screening itself, for here was a man, Dance, the British actor, starring as the American-born documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, whose north-trudging adventures had yielded Nanook of the North, the first feature documentary in a genre long since claimed by Canadians as their own: a film about a man invading another culture, an entire race of people to which he could never fully belong but was obviously attracted.

Charles Dance as Robert Flaherty in "Kabloonak"

Kabloonak is the story of Flaherty's encounter with the Inuit of Port Harrison (now Inukjuak), and encounter that led to the stunning achievement and subsequent success of Nanook of the North in 1922. What you see in Kabloonak is Charles Dance doing Robert Flaherty whose precious habits of culture and civilization, as the film reveals, found no easy or natural place with the ruggedly independent Inuit of Frobisher Bay, for whom a good day meant a fresh catch of seal and a wind-tight igloo. Doubtless, Flaherty's life was irrevocably changed by his experience with Nanook and his family. He even lived with one of the women, Nyla, and with her fathered a child, who died in Resolute Bay at the age of 60. Massot's direction so confidently conveys the tensions arising from this hulking white man's presence in the frozen north that by the time the film is over you are humbled by both the intensity and the dignity of the experience.

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© 1994 Noreen G.