Zacharias Kunuk reimagines the classic Western in his new film Searchers
"I grew up on the land," says Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, "when I was a child I thought we were the only people on Earth." Kunuk has always been a fan of film, but growing up in Nunavut meant the movies he watched had a profound influence on him. At the age of nine, he was sent to school in the small community of Igloolik to learn how to read and write in English. "When I came to that community," says Kunuk, "at that time, they had a little community hall where they would show 16 millimetre movies. A lot of it was cowboys and Indians and John Wayne." Since he learned English in school, Kunuk could understand parts of the dialogue in the Western films he watched. Kunuk admits that as a child, "John Wayne was our hero." Yet, as the filmmaker grew older, he began to see his hero in a new light. Kunuk says, "I started to notice there are two sides to every story."
In his new film Searchers (Maliglutit), Kunuk is reimagining the Western narrative. Based on John Wayne's 1956 film called The Searchers, Kunuk's version employs an all-Inuit cast, speaking in Inuktituk. "I wanted to use this structure and tell that story," says the filmmaker of taking ownership of the Western genre. "My interest is in the older stories," he admits. "There's other stories that happen in Canada that we don't know, but imagine if we turn them into film, then everyone knows that's what happened," explains Kunuk. By telling older stories or ones that are not represented in the media, Kunuk believes it encourages people to take interest in new narratives.
Searchers, set in Nunavut during the early 1900s, follows a man who returns home from hunting to discover that his wife and daughter have been kidnapped. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and is now up for two Canadian Screen Awards.
Searchers begins playing at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto today. Find more details about the film here.
WEB EXTRA | Watch the trailer for Searchers (Maliglutit) below.