Tautuktavuk

The latest from the Isuma Collective, best known for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and The Journals of Knut Rasmussen is a taboo-challenging collaboration between co-directors Carol Kunnuk and Lucy Tulugarjuk, who also play the sisters at the heart of the film and cowrote the screenplay. A victim of domestic abuse, Uyarak (Tulugarjuk) has fled her home in Igloolik for the superior social services of Montreal — an exile reinforced by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Conversing with her sister Saqpinak (Kunnuk) in a series of Zoom calls, Uyarak gradually breaks with tradition and articulates her trauma, encouraging Saqpinak to do the same.

So authentic that it often feels like a documentary (it isn’t), the film is both a sympathetic, empowering drama about two women speaking up and speaking out, and an insightful chronicle of life in Nunavut during the pandemic.

Director’s Statement:
“This was our opportunity to create something from two women, to show Inuit women’s lives never seen before. Our mothers did not have a voice in the way we have a voice now. We both take very seriously that we are messengers from our families and communities, we are the ones with the tools to make films of women speaking from their experiences – tools to work towards changing some of the terrible injustices we live with. Women are constantly subjected to violence and harassment, and we want this film to make these issues undeniable.” Lucy Tulugarjuk

Mar 15: Pre-recorded interview with co-directors Carol Kunnuk & Lucy Tulugarjuk

Driven with a fine eye for the cadence of daily life and a sincere effort to explore domestic spaces, often through the seemingly limited perspective of a webcam, Tautuktavuk (What We See) is a smartly feminist tale of shared resilience. This is a film of quiet power about the sense of community that unites us no matter how far we may be physically apart.

Pat Mullen, POV magazine

It doesn’t matter which parts of the verité-style film Tautuktavuk (What We See) are scripted and which aren’t. Co-directors Lucy Tulugarjuk and Carol Kunnuk have woven their experiences and those of friends and family into a documentary/fiction hybrid that doesn’t have to worry about what’s real, because it’s about what’s true: The persistence of trauma in Inuit communities. The ubiquity of abuse – sexual and physical, domestic and institutional. The grave lack of support systems in the North. The solace of community. The effort of healing.

Johanna Schneller, Globe and Mail