Vision Man (1997)

Overview

Utuniarsuak Avike is an Eskimo 87 years old, a hunter living in the Thule district of Northwest Greenland. With a bizarre sense of humour and the greatest possible naturalness towards the camera (he addresses the audience directly), Utuniarsuak tells about the life that lies behind him. Parallels with NANOOK OF THE NORTH, the famous Eskimo documentary that Robert Flaherty made in 1922, are obvious. Utuniarsuak tells how he became an orphan at a young age because his parents had succumbed to tuberculosis. The disease was introduced on the island by European whale hunters. He also remembers how Greenland was proclaimed a Danish colony in 1932 and how the inhabitants of the Thule district were given a family name for the first time in their lives, for registering purposes (until then Greenlanders had had only a single name). Danish was introduced as the official language, which explains why today only a few hundred from the Thule district still speak their original dialect.