Searchers / Maliglutit (2016) dir. Zacharias Kunuk & Natar Ungalaaq

Set upon the sprawling tundra of the Canadian Arctic, this entrancing new work from visionary filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk—whose Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner was recently voted the greatest Canadian film of all time—tracks a search led by an Inuk man for the marauders who pillaged his home and kidnapped his wife. 60 years after John Ford’s iconic The Searchers, Kunuk and his collaborators have crafted a companion piece that is both homage and a critique, a searing mediation on vengeance and the colonialist doctrine lodged deep in the heart of the western. Maliglutit is an astonishing spectacle, a thrilling story, an iconoclastic reassessment of genre, and a window into a world seldom seen at the movies. It is winter in Nunavut in the early 1900s. An intimate, lively celebration in an igloo is disrupted by four misbehaving hunters. An elder anticipates a bad omen, so the group decides to ban these men, as their egoistic ways are a threat to the community’s stability. The men wander off enraged, feeling superior and fearless, forgetting their tradition. Far away from this turmoil, Kuanana leads a tranquil and content nomadic life with his family. He is a man of unwavering spirit, patient and focused. He sets out on a hunting trip, unknowing that savagery will befall his home, when the brutal renegades kidnap his wife and daughter. Kuanana goes out for revenge. With striking cinematography that comfortably sways between the vast open ice and the warm enclosed mood in the igloos, a hypnotic soundtrack, and genuine characters, eminent director Zacharias Kunuk delivers a masterful and artistic Western: an Inuit Western.