TIFF Interview: Directors Spotlight Inuit Trauma & Healing in Tautuktavuk (What We See)

By Liam Lacey

In 2001, the first feature film in the Inuit language, Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, won the first film award at Cannes, bringing international recognition to the emerging art form of Inuit cinema and the hamlet of Igoolik, an island community of about 2,000 souls located 125 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Actor and filmmaker Lucy Tulugarjuk

The film was a production of Isuma, the collective which Kunuk co-founded in 1990 and which has produced a steady stream of film and video productions, including features, documentaries, and web and television series.

Lucy Tulugarjuk, who played the deceptive Puja in Atanarjuat, is a multi-threat producer, writer, and director as well as executive director of the 24/7 all Inuit television channel. She is currently working on an original motion-capture animated film, The Shaman’s Apprentice, and has a role in the eighth Mission Impossible film, due out next year.

Her cousin Carol Kunnuk has also directed, written, and acted extensively in Isuma productions, and worked as a TV host. Together, they have brought their own film to this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, entitled Tautuktavuk (What We See). It’s final public screening happens today (Tuesday, Sept. 12) at the Scotiabank Theatre 10.

Read our capsule review of Tautuktavuk (What We See)

It’s a formally tricky hybrid documentary-fiction film that focuses on sisterhood, domestic violence, and healing in the context of a COVID lockdown in their community. In the film, they play sisters, who we first see communicating via Zoom.

Uyarak (Tulugarjuk) is the younger sister living in Montreal, where she has sought therapy after a violent domestic abuse incident. Her older sister Saqpinak (Kunnuk), the host of a local Igoolik television show, helps her remember the details of a terrifying night when Uyarak, dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts, ran barefoot through the snow, fleeing a violently abusive boyfriend.

The COVID restrictions emphasize the sense of entrapment. There are difficulties of an elder drum dancer who isn’t supposed to have people in his home in traditional spiritual practice of drum dancing. There’s a government subsidy to supplement imported food by encouraging unemployed workers to hunt seal again. As the film moves into its second half, COVID restrictions are eventually eased enough to allow Uyarak to return to Igoolik and reunite with her extended family.

I spoke with Tulugarjuk in the quiet of an empty Sunday afternoon food court beneath the Sheraton Hotel, away from the festival hubbub. She’s quiet-spoken but assertive. Did she remember the first conversation she had with Kunnuk about the film?

“We grew up closely as a family and we also worked closely in feature films with Zacharias,” she says. “We talked a lot about how masculine a lot of the films we've worked in are, and how they were historic from our ancestors living style.

“We wanted to do something from a woman's perspective in the modern day. And to bring attention to the injustices that we face almost daily. Southerners have assumptions that we have a good exchange with the government, but many promises were made that have been either met halfway or not really met.”

Actor and co-director Carol Kunnuk

When I describe the film as about “domestic abuse” she quickly corrects me. “No. It’s about healing. Yes, it’s about domestic violence in that, I can relate to domestic violence and it’s visible in almost every corner when I get home and we don’t often talk about it, and it’s not often mentioned in the public media. But I think it’s important to bring it out and get people to understand we don’t get the services we need as much as in the south.”

Social workers say that domestic violence increased everywhere during the COVID lockdown, though, as Tulugarjuk says, the effect was to clarify an existing problem that “was made worse when people were trapped in their homes.”

The COVID complication came when the film was already in the works. “Originally all the filming was going to be shot live, with me and my sister character speaking face-to-face, but with the restrictions, we had to shift, using Zoom calls and figuring out solutions that were nearly impossible that we had to make possible.”

One issue raised in the film is that, during the lockdown, police were reluctant to make house calls. As one character notes, victims were simply told to “behave themselves.”

Though not autobiographical, the film is highly personal. Tulugarjuk shot several scenes from her apartment in Montreal. (The Elle magazine cover on her coffee table features three Indigenous models).

There’s a scene where she visits a friend, the Inuk singer Beatrice Deer, whose daughter gives Tulugarjuk a wrist tattoo on camera, with dotted lines representing her four children, parents, and herself. The co-directors’ real aunt (Madeline Ivalu) plays their aunt on camera, talking about how, traditionally, domestic conflicts were kept private. The police weren’t trusted, and mothers were afraid of calling the authorities for fear of having their children taken into foster care.

Another theme in the movie is various characters struggles with sobriety. “I know alcohol has a lot of influence in violence in the current day because it causes people to do things they would not normally do if they were sober. From my childhood, it was so, so rare to see violence or someone walking down the middle of the road at night, being angry. Now it’s much more common.”

Before therapy was available, what would healing and conflict resolution look like in a traditional Inuit culture?

“I used to say the level of knowledge of a professor at a university and our elders may be equal, but he or she doesn’t have the paper of qualification. Traditionally, the elders would gather with the person who was having conflict and talk to her or him and try and resolve it right away.”

In contrast, she says, conflicts today are settled by a northern circuit court, which comes to town every six weeks. Court dates may be postponed up to two years or more, keeping the dispute simmering rather than resolving it.

Given the Inuit emphasis on the collective good (the “we” in the title) as essential to survival, I wondered if she were apprehensive of stigmatizing the community by focusing on how women are hurt and kept silent?

The answer, told through an anecdote, is about the need for acknowledgement of the problem and resources to help.

When she was in Montreal one day, she encountered an Inuk woman who asked her to buy her some breakfast, so she went to a local A&W and bought her some food. Another woman who saw this happen said sarcastically, “These people always want steaks.”

“I said, ‘Are you talking about my people?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you’re not Asian?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. Have any of my people asked you for steaks before?’

“So often people stereotype the way people live off donations or on the street, that we’re perceived as begging for what we want or need.”

“For what was yours?” I suggest.

She corrects me, again. “What is ours, not was ours. What people don’t understand is that European schooling is one-sided, so we must teach from the other side of the street, right?”

She’s aware of her culture’s history. In her younger days, Tulugarjuk worked for four summers on an archaeological dig, which established there was a community of sod houses where Igoolik now stands 4,000 years ago.

I had a question about the barefoot running scene, which is repeated several times during the film. There were just two takes, one for a closeup and one a medium shot of Tulugarjuk running in the snow. Between takes, she warmed her feet on a caribou hide which co-director Kunnuk provided.

Surely, it was an homage to the naked run in Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner?

“No,” she says, “I expected that question from journalists. It’s got nothing to do with The Fast Runner. It's about what a woman goes through to escape violence in the modern day in her bare feet.”