of the North

An unfiltered portrait of Arctic life built from the images of its own people

Of the North is a documentary film assembled entirely from images filmed and shared online by Inuit communities across the Arctic. Working with almost five hundred hours of videos posted on the web, filmmaker Dominic Gagnon transforms this vast digital archive into a rhythmic and fiercely anti exotic portrait that dismantles the familiar canon of northern representation. Instead of returning to the staged ethnographic gaze of Nanook of the North, Gagnon allows the inhabitants of these territories to create their own cinema. Their recordings include hunting scenes, drinking sessions, snowmobile races, oil rigs, jam gatherings, moments of exhibitionism and encounters with polar bears. Together they reveal a form of unbridled acculturation and a contemporary reality often ignored or simplified.

The director describes his method as a discipline of chaos, where the challenge is no longer to capture new images but to find ways to look at the overwhelming quantity that already exists. By excavating and reorganising this unstable online material, he preserves images that might otherwise disappear and crafts a film shaped by the multiple viewpoints of those who filmed themselves. Sound becomes a central element, mixing the industrial noise of machines with throat singing and country punk melodies, creating an enveloping physical experience in contrast to the immense landscapes that appear on screen. Without travelling to the Arctic or meeting his subjects in person, Gagnon immerses himself through editing, adopting the position of what he calls a stay at home anthropologist, and offering a complex, intimate and often provocative vision of a world too rarely seen through its own eyes.