The Journals of Knud Rasmussen

After the timeless fable of ‘Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner’, Kunuk and Cohn return with a more reflective offering, which considers from the Inuit perspective the arrival in 1922 of Danish anthropologist Knud Rasmussen in Arctic Canada to document their systems of belief. What emerges from this careful chronicle is a pantheistic worldview integrated into the Inuit’s harmony with the inhospitable landscape, and its subsequent destruction when the adoption of Christianity removed the central influence of the community shamen. Less accessible than its predecessor, it’s still a cumulatively powerful story of loss, played out amid extraordinary images of the tundra.