Arctic Film Screenings at Charles University – 1

10.00–11.10    Canada

Last Days of Okak, CA 1985, 24 min., directed by Anne Budgell and Nigel Markham (EN)

If the Weather Permits, CA 2003, 27 min, directed by Elisapie Isaac (EN)

A documentary from the settlement of Kangirsujuaq in Nunavik. In this community on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, the streets are filled with children’s laughter and old people think about life. They are nomads from the vast plains. Teenagers imitate “southern” culture and play golf in the tundra, while older generations are slowly dying as all their culture seems to be disappearing.

Nowhere Land, CA 2015, 15 min, directed by Bonnie Ammaaq (EN)

This short documentary serves as a quiet elegy for way of life, which exists now only in the memories of those who experienced it. Bonnie Ammaaq and her family remember it vividly. When Bonnie was a little girl, her parents packed up their essentials, bundled her and her younger brother onto a long, fur-lined sled and left the government-manufactured community of Igloolik to live off the land as had generations of Inuit before them.

11.10–12.15    Siberia

Bear Islands, CZ 2010, 62 min, directed by Martin Ryšavý

A poetic documentary from the Russian Arctic. A group of men set out on a journey on the frozen surface of the East Siberian Sea and after a short travel they arrive at an abandoned meteorological station on Four-Columns-Island. They stay there for a few days, hunting and talking together. In the snowy landscape, people’s memories intertwine with the memories of old abandoned buildings. The place where time stopped a long time ago comes to life again with the visit of men and through film. When the men leave the station, it remains the same in its snow immobility, but the viewer has experienced its present and past. The film is a portrait of the landscape, its past and the man in it. In the film Bear Islands, Martin Ryšavý builds on his previous projects dealing with the Russian Far Eastern Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The film focuses on people from the most remote part of this area, which is the Nizhny Kolymsk District, especially the inhabitants of the polar bear reserve, located on the Bear Islands in the East Siberian Sea at the mouth of the river Kolyma.