Independent Inuit Film: The Fast Runner Trilogy @ Yerba Buena Center for the Arts April 9, 2010

Independent Inuit Film: The Fast Runner Trilogy

Fri, Apr 9, 7:30 pm: Before Tomorrow

Sun, Apr 11, 2 pm: Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner

Sat, Apr 17, 7:30 pm: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen

Igloolik is a community of 1,200 people located on a small island in the north Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic with archeological evidence of 4,000 years of continuous habitation. Throughout these millennia, with no written language, untold numbers of nomadic Inuit renewed their culture and traditional knowledge for every generation entirely through storytelling. These three brilliantly original films express the dramatic history of one of the world’s oldest oral cultures from its own point of view.

BEFORE TOMORROW
By Marie-Hélène Cousineau & Madeline Piujuq Ivalu
Fri, Apr 9, 7:30 pm
Marie-Hélène Cousineau in person
Before Tomorrow is set in 1840, a time when many Inuit had yet to meet white people and thus maintained their traditional way of life. It is a tender, affecting tale of a small boy and his beloved grandmother, caught between the harsh Arctic wilderness and first contact with the outside world. “Visually transfixing. A mystical evocation of the power of Inuit mythology.”
– The New York Times (2008, 93 min, digital video)

ATANARJUAT, THE FAST RUNNER
By Zacharias Kunuk
Sun, Apr 11, 2 pm
“Winner of the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, the first feature in the Inuktitut language is an epic account of an Inuit blood feud, shot on DV in northernmost Canada. Mysterious, bawdy, emotionally intense and replete with virtuoso throat singing, this three-hour movie is engrossing from first image to last, so devoid of stereotype and cosmic in its vision it could suggest the rebirth of cinema.” – The Village Voice (2001, 172 min, digital video)

THE JOURNALS OF KNUD RASMUSSEN
By Zacharias Kunuk & Norman Cohn
Sat, Apr 17, 7:30 pm
Drawing from the accounts of Knud Rasmussen, a Danish Inuit explorer, the coming of Christianity and commerce to the Canadian North is seen through the eyes of the last great shaman of Igloolik and his headstrong daughter. (2006, 112 min, digital video)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Screening Room
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Public Info: 415-978-2787 or www.ybca.org/tickets/production/view.aspx?id=11047

Tickets: $8 regular; $6 students, seniors, teachers & YBCA members

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Images can be found at http://www.ybca.org/about/press