North of North co-creators on making a heartfelt, relatable and groundbreaking Inuit comedy
Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril talk to Q’s Tom Power about their new CBC sitcom
North of North is a heartfelt new comedy series from CBC that follows a young Inuk mother named Siaja (Anna Lambe) who's on a journey to reclaim her life.
Siaja lives in the fictional Arctic community of Ice Cove, where everyone knows everyone's business. After she suddenly — and very publicly — ends her marriage to the town golden boy, Ting (Kelly William), she decides to embark on a fresh start with her daughter (Keira Belle Cooper), taking on a bigger and more meaningful role in her community along the way.
In an interview with Q's Tom Power, the show's creators, Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, say they based the character on their own experiences as ambitious young Inuit women who wanted to overcome colonial trauma to make their communities better.
"Even in the hardest of moments, I've always found that we're a people that love to laugh, and we kind of laugh our way through any situation," Aglok MacDonald says. "We also had a couple of other young, nerdy, ambitious, hopeful Inuit women in the [writers'] room with us…. It always feels like it comes back to the community, and trying to make our homes and our lives a little more joyful and a little less f—ked up."
Arnaquq-Baril adds that all of the show's characters are combinations of the Inuit women in the writers' room, as well as some of their best friends.
"The dynamics that happen between the characters, they're going to feel really familiar to, I think, not just Inuit, but other Indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities as well," Arnaquq-Baril says.
North of North makes its world premiere in Canada on CBC TV, CBC Gem and APTN on Jan. 7. The series will also launch on Netflix in the spring.
The full interview with Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. They also talk about shooting the series in Iqaluit, where they both live, and how they're changing the conversation around Inuit representation on-screen. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril produced by Cora Nijhawan.
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