Arctic Boyhood

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/opinion/greenland-arctic-childhood.html

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I started making documentaries by shooting fragments of my family’s life on their farm, in the snow-covered mountains of Jura, in eastern France. My fascination with documenting rural, snow-covered and remote worlds on film is what led me to Greenland.

I first visited Greenland in 2015. That was when I met Julius, a villager who guided me through the five villages around Tasiilaq, which with around 2,000 inhabitants is the largest town on Greenland’s east coast. It quickly became obvious I would focus my film on Julius’s own village, Tiniteqilaaq. The village has only around 60 inhabitants and is isolated from the rest of the world by ice for about nine months every year. Over the course of the next year, I spent several months there and learned to share the lifestyle of its inhabitants: I went hunting and fishing with the men, shared family dinners of seal and narwhal, and attended baptisms and funerals. Little by little, I was accepted by Julius’s friends and family. After all, we shared more in common than it might have seemed: Since I come from a village of 250 in Jura, there is nothing less exotic to me than a village half that size.

Ultimately, I wound up using my time in Julius’s town to make my fourth feature film, “A Polar Year,” from which this short documentary is adapted. Just as my feature film traces the village’s life over one year, through the changing seasons and rhythms of life and death, for this short I followed one of its young residents during the routine of a single day.

The result is a portrait of Asser Boassen, an 8-year-old Tunumiit boy who wants to become a hunter. Like many children of his village, Asser has not been raised by his biological parents. Instead, he lives with his grandparents, Thomasine and Gert Jonathansen. In many ways, Asser’s daily life as a young boy, fed by the hunting tradition passed on by his grandfather and by the mythical stories told by his grandmother, represents challenges many in modern Greenland are navigating. When Asser turns 12, he will have to leave his village to attend middle school in the city, far away. When he returns to his village, he will be 16, effectively an adult, and uprooted from the traditions and knowledge he spent his childhood absorbing from his grandparents. Across the country, Inuit children are torn between two conceptions of education, one rooted in their native identity and the other imposed by a globalized world — knowledge that is essential for navigating that very world. The outcomes are often problematic. But for now Asser is just a child dreaming to become a great hunter. As great as Qajaarngaa, the mythical hunter who triumphs in Asser’s grandmother’s tale.