Inuuniddinni Ilaaralaaor: Part of Us

There is a small documentary film that sits somewhat awkwardly (and quite happily) between two PREFER-related projects.

Inuuniddinni Ilaaralaaor (Part of Us) was made in Ittoqqortoormiit, Kalaallit Nunaat, in 2023. It came out of several years of research in the community, initially carried out within the SeMPER-Arctic project. By the time the film was made, however, PREFER had started, and the same fieldwork and many of the same questions had become part of PREFER.

So the film is both things. It is a restitution of SeMPER-Arctic research, made after much of that work had been done. At the same time, it was an early, almost experimental restitution within PREFER: rather than waiting until the end of a research project to return results, could we make something with people while the research was still going on?

The film began with stories we had heard repeatedly in Ittoqqortoormiit. People talked about the importance of the narwhal, about hunting and mattak, about sea ice and about the difficulties created by hunting regulations and quotas. The year 2021 came up again and again: only two narwhals had been caught. These were not abstract stories about environmental change. They were stories about food, family, work, identity and a way of living in which the narwhal has a very ordinary place.

The idea was therefore quite simple: let people tell these stories themselves.

The film was written and produced in Ittoqqortoormiit in about three weeks. Community members took part in different parts of the process, including storytelling, production, translation, transcription, voice-over and captioning. The film is in the local language, Tunumisut. The researchers are there, but their voices are deliberately not the main ones. The point was to make some room for the people whose lives the research was trying to understand.

The first screening took place in the community, during a Kaffemik. It was later shared more widely, including through the local Facebook page, and subsequently shown in the New Genre Arctic Art and Art Education exhibition at the Arctic Congress in Bodø and in Rovaniemi.
The film is not meant to provide a complete account of life in Ittoqqortoormiit, nor does it claim to speak for the community. It is much more modest than that. It records a few people talking about things that matter to them, and it tries to leave those conversations in a form that can travel beyond the research encounter.

This is also why the film matters for PREFER. Restitution does not necessarily have to wait until the research is finished. Sometimes making something together, and seeing what happens when it is shown back to the people who contributed to it, is itself part of the research.

Inuuniddinni Ilaaralaaor was one of our first attempts at doing this. It remains a small film about quite ordinary lives, and about how those lives can become difficult to see when environmental, scientific or administrative accounts of change become the only ones that count.