VIFF review: Anerca, Breath of Life celebrates the cultures of the Arctic Circle
From Russia’s Chukchi to Greenland’s Inuit and Canada’s Haida, impressions of far-flung but deeply connected Indigenous peoples
Still of a man sitting on a doorstep holding a hand-carved object, taken from documentary Anerca, Breath of Life
Streams September 24 to October 7 as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival, via VIFF.org
THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES of the Arctic Circle may be divided by thousands of kilometres and arbitrary borders, but this poetic array of music, dance, visual art, and storytelling shows their interconnection.
Finnish documentarians Johannesburg and Markku Lehmuskallio travel from the Chukchi in Russia to the Sami in Scandinavia, the Yupik in Alaska, the Inuit in Canada and Greenland, and the Haida here in B.C., capturing ancient cultures coming up against a contemporary world.
The impressionistic stream of vignettes is a little loosey-goosey, but they come up with some striking original footage.
In one scene, a dancer in the sinister black makeup of the uaajeerneq mask dance moves against a bleak urban landscape in the Greenlandic capital of Nuuk. In another, a Chuchki woman tells a story about the tradition of facial tattoos, then reveals her own to be makeup, wiping them off.
Amid the impressionistic, (occasionally anthropological feeling) vignettes, minimal narration cites the year white explorers discovered each people. But it interrupts the mesmerizing flow of images of art and nature.
The wildly varied soundtrack, venturing from throat singing and traditional drum beats to rap and even Arvo Part gives it all an otherworldly feel. And Indigenous languages add their own kind of music, underscoring the shared experience of cultural loss.
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