One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk

In April 1961, John Kennedy is America’s new President, the Cold War heats up in Berlin and nuclear bombers are deployed from bases in arctic Canada. In Kapuivik, north Baffin Island, Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dog team as his ancestors did when he was born in 1900. When the white man known as Boss arrives at Piugattuk’s hunting camp, what appears as a chance meeting soon opens up the prospect of momentous change. Boss is an agent of the government, assigned to get Piugattuk to move his band to settlement housing and send his children to school so they can get jobs and make money. But Kapuivik is Piugattuk’s homeland. He takes no part in the Canadian experience; and cannot imagine what his children would do with money.

Inuuvunga: I am Inuk I am Alive

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Through an initiative of the National Film Board of Canada in collaboration with the Kativik School Board , eight students were selected to document this pivotal year of their lives. To teach them the essentials of filmmaking , the NFB dispatched independent filmmakers Daniel Cross and Mila Aung-Thwin. The result of their collaboration is Inuuvunga, a vibrant and utterly contemporary view of life in Canada’s North.

Fearless and fragile , the students use their new film skills to address a broad range of issues, from the widening communication gap with their elders to the loss of their peers to suicide. Throughout, they portray the co-existence of southern and northern cultures: Kids listen to hip-hop music and engage in traditional fox trapping. A schoolroom floor is the scene of the gutting of a freshly killed seal.

Seamless and startling, Inuuvunga paints a rich and diverse portrait of coming of age in an Inuit town. It dispels the myths of northern isolation and desolation , and reveals instead a place where hope and strength overcome adversity.

The Long Walk

Ken Ward was the first Native Canadian to go public with his HIV diagnosis. Seven years later he has developed AIDS and remains a passionate advocate for HIV prevention and treatment. Ward works primarily with First Nations populations, where the epidemic is often compounded by isolation and poverty. He also takes his message into prisons where the infection rate among Native inmates is 17 times the national average. Bibby accompanies Ward as he travels the back roads of the Canadian West, nurturing tolerance and understanding within fearful communities.