Zacharias Kunuk

Film & Video, Writing

Zacharias Kunuk is passionate about telling the stories of Inuit people – the 2001 Cannes Camera D’Or award winner sees the camera as a great equalizer of our time.

In their own words (transcript)

I guess I’m a video maker, I started with video. I’m from Igloolik, in Nunavut, way up there. I always lived in my own community. When you know your subject, you go after it. When you’re a filmmaker, you come with cameras, tripods, lights, and whole crew behind the camera. That’s very distracting, to an Inuq, especially a bilingual Inuq. Zacharias Kunuk

Before I moved into this medium, I was a sculptor. I’m sculpturing soap stone from just a block, with your hands, and you create it and it becomes something, and it’s talking and you look at it from all angles and it’s a scene. But when I heard that any person, any breathing person, could own a moving picture camera, why not me? Because my father goes out hunting and comes back and sits with his hunting buddies, and drink tea, and they tell a terrific story. What if you just capture it on video, and you could see what they’re talking about?

Watch the full interview with Zacharias

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