Original-Cin Chat: Zacharias Kunuk on Trolls, The Fog Lady, and True Love in Wrong Husband
By Liam Lacey
When Hollywood studios want to make a movie involving characters with super-human powers and stage grand battles fought on epic landscapes, they set budgets that rival the GDP of small countries. They do things differently north of the Arctic circle.
When Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk shot his latest film Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) last summer with a $3.2-million budget — roughly 1/100th of the budget of a Marvel Comics movie — there was one camera and two locations.
His crew and cast lived in canvas tents for more than a month. Meals were shared together. Scenes might be shot at any time of the day or night, sometimes at 2 am, when the sun hung low on the horizon. Sleep came when you had time.
All this took place on a stunning minimalist set design of ice floes, rock-strewn tundra, black water, the gunmetal grey sky and 24 hours of pale light each day. It was a backdrop essentially unchanged from the period when the film is set, about 4,000 years ago.
Kunuk first gained global attention with his 2001 film, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the first feature film to be written, directed, and acted entirely in the Inukitut language. At the Cannes Festival, it won the Camera d’Or, for best first feature and raves from critics.
In a review in The Village Voice, the eminent American critic Jim Hoberman declared that “Atanarjuat is so elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema.” In 2015, a Toronto International Film Festival poll of filmmakers and critics selected it as the greatest Canadian film of all time.
Now 67, Kunuk has continued his prolific career as founder and president of Isuma Productions, directing, writing and producing documentaries, shorts, television series and further features (The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Searchers, One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk).
His new film marks his return to the kind of traditional oral history narrative of Atanarjuat. At September’s TIFF, where his film won the juried Best Canadian Feature award, Kunuk spoke about Uiksaringitara, the parts of the story that were traditional and the ideas he invented. He was accompanied by two young stars of the film: Theresia Kappianaq as the bride Kaujak, and Haiden Angutimarik as Sapa, the husband who must win her back from an abusive rival.
To start with, the story of a man who fought another man to win back his betrothed is a tale that Kunuk heard as a kid growing up in the 1960s, a period when arranged marriages still existed in some parts of the North. Some of the supernatural characters in the film belong to Inuit tradition, including a giant black troll that lives under the sea and pops up to snatch wandering children.
To get the details right, Kunuk consulted with elders in the community.
“It’s tough because few people have seen a troll in my area. So, getting the troll right, how does it look? I mean, when we were children our parents would say, ‘Don’t wander too far, or the troll will catch you.’ So, the people who have seen it told us, ‘He had a very big nose.’”
The relationship between the supernatural beings, the shamans who manipulate them, and other humans in the film is complex. There’s a grandmotherly good shaman, determined to keep the lovers together, assisted by an ethereal spirit known as the Fog Lady. The woman shaman is in a battle with an evil male shaman with long white hair, whose allies include the big-nosed troll and a wolf.
Although Kunuk had not intended to use special effects when he shot the film, he changed his mind when doing post-production in Montreal last fall, when it came to establishing the presence of the Fog Lady.
She appears in the film, half-transparent, surrounded by swirling ribbons of mist. There’s a sequence he’s particularly proud of, when the character of Kaujak, finding herself trapped with an abusive fiancé, begs for aid from the spirit realm. The Fog Lady spirit speaks into the ear of the woman shaman, who opens her mouth and speaks directly to Sapa in Kaujak’s voice, begging her husband to come rescue her.
“They told me that couldn’t be done and to stop wasting time,” says Kunuk. “But we did it. It’s something that’s never been done before.”
To find his young actors, Kunuk placed public service announcements on the radio and through local high schools. Auditions for the teen actors had to wait until classes were over. What was he looking for?
“Faces,” he says. “Faces and voices.”
Angutimarik, who plays Sapa, heard about the casting call in high school. He hadn’t acted before, but his mother had previously appeared in a film by Kunuk. “I was able to get the lead role right away,” he says. “The more I played Sapa, the more I got to know him and what it was like for him four thousand years ago.”
In January, when the film was screened for a private audience at the Return of the Sun festival in Iglooklik, the cast finally saw the finished product with the special effects included. Angutimarik declared the results “awesome.”
When I asked Kappianaq, his co-star, she giggled and declined to answer. (“She’s very shy,” explained Kunuk.)
Near the end of Uiksaringitara, Sapa, the rightful husband, climbs up to a mountain and meditates and trains physically in preparation for his showdown with the wrong husband. When he is mentally and physically ready, he hears the call of a falcon and descends to the lowland to confront his rival.
I asked if the meditative retreat was a traditional element in the story.
“That was me,” says Kunuk. “That’s what I do. I just go and sit alone and think. I have to see everything before I do it. That’s my job. Then, when you hear the falcon call, you come back.”
Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband). Directed by Zacharias Kunuk. Starring Theresia Kappianaq and Haiden Angutimarik. Opens at Toronto’s (TIFF Lightbox) as well as in Winnipeg, Montreal, St. John’s, and Quebec City on November 28; followed by Baie-Comeau (December 4), Hamilton (January 2), Campbellford (January 15), and Dawson City (January 18) with more dates coming soon.