Maliglutit (Searchers) by Zacharias Kunuk

Set against the wide expanse of the arctic, Zacharias Kunuk’s Inuit reclamation of the revenge Western follows a man’s pursuit of his kidnapped family. Where John Ford’s central character in his troubling classic The Searchers pursued racial vengeance, Maliglutit’s central character, Kuanana, uses violence to serve restoration—correcting and restoring the order of a world and a society that can only function with cooperation. Punctuated by the cyclical breathing of Tanya Tagaq’s throat singing, the film counters the colonial archetypes of the West, foregrounding the landscape as a living presence rather than a frontier obstacle. 2016, Canada, DCP, in Inuktitut with English subtitles, 94 min.

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