Film
Beyond the Canon: Maliglutit + The Searchers
- 5PM
Dir. Zacharias Kunuk & Natar Ungalaaq
With Benjamin Kunuk, Karen Ivalu, Jonah Qunaq
2016, 94min, DCP
Inspired by John Ford’s The Searchers, this gripping Inuit feature is a snowbound western set amid the arctic reaches of Northern Canada. In this forbidding tundra, a man embarks on a perilous revenge mission after his wife and daughter are kidnapped. In telling the story from an indigenous perspective, director Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) subverts its colonialist gaze to craft a stirring survival saga that has the elemental power of a myth.
Dir. John Ford
John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles
1956, 119min, 35mm
One of the landmarks of the classical Hollywood western, John Ford’s complex study of racism and revenge casts John Wayne in one of his darkest roles, an antihero driven by hatred as he embarks on an obsessive, years-long quest to track down the Comanches who kidnapped his niece. The striking, lunar landscapes of Monument Valley provide the majestic backdrop to this proto-revisionist interrogation of the heroic mythology of the Old West.
Despite their obvious similarities, it is overly simplistic to describe Inuit directors Zacharius Kunuk’s and Nataar Ungaalaq’s Maliglutit (Searchers) as a remake of John Ford’s iconic western The Searchers. Even calling it a reimagining falls short of capturing how Kunuk’s film upends the very tradition that birthed a film such as Ford’s.
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A 90s New Queer Cinema landmark screens alongside the classic 1934 race melodrama.