PEOPLE OF THE ICE | directed
by Carlos Ferrand
INTERVIEW WITH CARLOS FERRAND
Interviewer:
You're shooting in Nunavut at the moment; can you tell us about your film?
Ferrand: It's going well. We've had a good trip, a beautiful trip, because we've known the characters for a while now. That's the most important thing, I think it puts people at ease in their soul, in the way they communicate. They're so happy when they go off hunting or fishing, it's a real pleasure to follow them, even though of course there are times when it's tough.
Interviewer: Can you tell us who your characters are?
Ferrand: There is Meeka Mike who lives in Iqaluit. And we went to visit her father who lives in Pangnirtung and is 74 years old. He's still healthy and he really knows a lot about life here. The other character is Joshua, an Inuit businessman who enjoys going hunting with his dogs and a few skidoos. We went to his camp. So we followed the same route as in the fall: we did Pangnirtung, Iqaluit and Cape Dorset in the fall, and we're going to do the same route in the snow. We visit the same people and the same places but in another season. So we travelled to Pangnirtung with Meeka's father, then we went on an expedition with Meeka and Trufa. They are three or four hours from Iqaluit, in a camp that Joshua built. There, we went hunting for caribou and seal.
Interviewer: So your film, Carlos, is about the Inuit, their way of life and how climate change will affect them.
Ferrand: That's right, because the environment is intimately linked to the people. That's what Bruce Rigby of the Iqaluit Research Centre, whom we met this morning, says. You can't separate them here like you can in a city where you're isolated from the environment. Here, the slightest change affects them. The Inuit use the same words to describe the weather and a person's state of being, intelligence and all that. Temperature, wind, wind chill factor - that's what's on everyone's lips. Today, we went to do interviews in an office and they printed out the Web page from the Prairies for us with the forecast for the day and the week. They calculate that with the wind chill factor, it'll go down to minus 38. Today it's minus 34. So if we plan to film outdoors, we know what conditions we'll be filming in. All that to say that weather is not an abstraction, it's at the heart of life.
Interviewer: What are the main issues that you'll cover in the film?
Ferrand: There are two threads in my film: Inuit culture and the environment. And the two are intimately connected, as I've been told. Inuktitut, which is the Inuit language, is a database on temperature. The Inuit are great nature watchers: they have a way of speaking that is very complex and that describes very, very well what they are experiencing. In other words, you can't separate culture and environment; it's all one thing. That's what makes it so interesting. The subject of the film is global warming, so it's culture warming in a sense. If the ice cracks, the culture cracks too, because there are many people who live off the hunt. You see how everything is intimately linked.
Interviewer: Do you have some impressions of the shooting that you want to share, things that affected you?
Ferrand: I saw the most beautiful aurora borealis I have ever seen in my life. And I saw and filmed a caribou running in the snow. It was like a dance; it was incredible. And when they hunt seal, they have to cut it up as fast as possible before it freezes - they do it with such precision! Everything is clean. They use absolutely everything, the skin, the intestines, etc. And you eat it right there on the ice. It's so fresh! And delicious, too.
Interviewer: What impression would you like your film to leave on people who see it?
Ferrand: That human beings are intimately linked to their environment. That's where the strength of the film lies. Here, you can't disregard the connection with the environment, the land and nature and all that. Elsewhere you can, but here it's impossible. The two are intimately connected and that's why it's interesting to make a film about climate change in the Arctic. The slightest variation resonates everywhere. Yesterday, they told me they had caught salmon here three weeks ago. That had never, never happened before. Salmon never gets so far north. Because the fish found here is arctic char, which is in the salmon family, but there were no salmon here. And they've seen birds, like robins, that have passed through here. They'd never, never seen any before. And for example, the snow is different from before and sometimes they can't build igloos because the snow is more crumbly. And let's say in the month of March, in the entire history of Baffin Island, the ice at a certain spot was always solid. There wasn't even any question about it. But now, people fall through the ice and die. And if you can't count on the ice anymore, what can you count on? Everything's different now. Some places are getting colder. It's not like everything's getting warmer. It's important to make that distinction. I think what characterizes this time period is instability.
Interviewer: So you're pretty pleased with the shooting you're doing?
Ferrand: Yes, we're very pleased. We've had some wonderful surprises, despite the fact that we had serious problems with the camera and had to change it.
Interviewer: What kind of problems?
Ferrand: It just stopped filming!
Interviewer: Because of the cold?
Ferrand: We don't know. Of course, when you're in the sled going I don't know how many kilometres an hour, and at the end of the day on the sled you go back onto the skidoo in the tundra... The camera went through all that. It's really cold. You take your hand out of your glove for three minutes and you're crying from the pain.
Interviewer: The shooting conditions are not easy...
Ferrand: No, not at all. But it's beautiful, it's just so beautiful, it's superb!
Interviewer: At this time of year, do you get really short days or is it the other way around, really short nights?
Ferrand: We're starting to get 13, 14 hours of light.
Interviewer: That must be impressive.
Ferrand: Yes. Another thing that makes it hard is we're doing the whole film in Inuktitut.
Interviewer: Is that important?
Ferrand: Yes, because it puts people more at ease. Their language has so much information that they can express many more nuances. The other day, Meeka and I were having supper and I asked her to tell me how many different kinds of ice there are, and by the time we finished eating, she was up to 16 different ice conditions and we hadn't even finished with the question.
Interviewer: So how do you do the interviews in Inuktitut? How do you understand what's going on?
Ferrand: Well, first of all I don't do the interviews. I film the action, most of the time. When there are interviews, one Inuk asks a question to another and we don't interrupt after each answer. In fact, they're not interviews so much as conversations. At the end of the conversation, we stop everything and she tells me what they talked about. Then I say, okay, can you have a conversation around this idea, or tell me a little more about that, and we start up again.
Interviewer: That requires a lot of attention.
Ferrand: Yes, but if we were making a film in Quebec and we forced everyone to speak English, it would be much less rich than if everyone spoke in their own language. It's up to us to make the effort, not them. It's much more pleasant that way, more complete and richer. They're comfortable, they're cheerful, they're pleased, and us - we're making a documentary. We're not making a fiction film, so it seems to me that the Interviewer:'s role is to follow, not to push. So we're just there. We try to be as attentive as possible to film what they want to do. And that, incidentally, is intimately linked to survival.
Interviewer: In what sense?
Ferrand: Because life is so difficult, you're always doing something. Just going out hunting to get food. We calculate that when we're with them, we spend 80 to 90% of the time just surviving, and we manage to shoot 10 to 20% of the time. It's extremely difficult.
Interviewer: For how long are you there?
Ferrand: Our trip lasts three weeks.
Interviewer: That's for the winter part.
Ferrand: For the winter part, yes.
Interviewer: You're going to Cape Dorset, is that to meet artists or more hunters?
Ferrand: Hunters. We are really disappointed because one of our main characters, Namunai Achouna, is a gentleman who's nearly 80 years old. He's sick, so he had to be brought to the South. It was just wonderful with him. He spent his entire life at Cape Dorset. You see, a man who's that age takes me all the way back to the middle of the last century, because he remembers his grandfather and grandmother. At the age of 80, you have stories that go a long way back. So you have points of comparison, for example in terms of climate. For example, the hunter in Cape Dorset tells me he thinks the ice is thinner than before, but that it's warming up from underneath. It's the sea that has warmed up a little. And that eats away at the ice from underneath. You see?
Interviewer: Yes. So this man who is sick, did you manage to film him in the fall at least?
Ferrand: Oh, yes. He has become one of our main characters.
Interviewer: Good, so at least you got him in the film. We'll be able to see him.
Ferrand: He's wonderful. He's amazing. And he liked to talk, he liked to tell stories, he knew so much. Our crew had really become friends with him. So we're sad. We're really sad. In fact, I think I'm going to dedicate the film to him because he represents traditional knowledge. He is the guardian of enormous technical and scientific knowledge, because everything is based on practice. That's why it's so important to preserve the culture. He himself comes from a family named Achouna. He comes from a family of fabulous Cape Dorset artists. I think one of the reasons why there are so many artists among the Inuit is that they are good observers, and they're able to reproduce what they have observed. Shamanism is often represented in Inuit art and the idea of metamorphosis is very important: shamans become animals, animals become human beings. This back-and-forth, this metamorphosis between the human being and nature is a constant theme of Inuit art. Now the Inuit must adapt to new cultural and climate conditions, after spending thousands of years living in igloos. Some people say they've lost their traditions, but the theme of metamorphosis is still a reflection of their experience.
Interviewer: That's going to be very interesting.
Ferrand: So that's that!