Canada's dirtiest secret, told by the people who survived it.
Zacharias Kunuk tackles the subject of the High Arctic Relocation from an Inuit point of view in the documentary Exile. In 1953, Inuit families were forcibly relocated to the uninhabited and inhospitable high arctic, 1500 kilometres north of their traditional homeland of Nunavik, in northern Québec. The goal of the move was to extend Canadian claims of sovereignty to Ellesmere Island. As a result, Inuit people were forced to endure the pain of families torn apart and many years of hardship. With devastating first-person accounts of survival, the trail of broken promises and shameful practices of the government and the RCMP, this powerful documentary captures the long-standing effects of these events from the perspectives of the people who were forced to endure them.
Direction
Kunuk centers Inuit voices with radical, necessary intimacy.
Writing
First-person accounts that dismantle official history completely.
Director
Zacharias Kunuk
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Kunuk is the same director who made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner—the first Inuktitut-language feature film ever. He specifically returned to documentary to reclaim this narrative from government archives.
The relocation's real purpose? Cold War sovereignty theater. Canada wanted to block Soviet claims to the Northwest Passage using Inuit families as human markers on a map.
CA
US
