Forign Films: The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)

Anyone else seen this movie?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fast_Runner

I learned of it listening to a CBC show - Ideas I think it was. And I just watched it today.

What a treasure trove foreign films are, It's only been the last couple of years that I got wise to this.

This is an Inuit film based on an ancient Inuit legend. What a powerful interesting story. You have to be patient it's difficult to follow at the start and if you don't like a 'documentary feel' (it's looks a bit like watching a home movie, well not that bad in fact everything is very steady and I think well framed, but I think it was done with video cameras) and it's hard for me to judge just how good the actors where in such an unfamiliar language but they were good enough for me to see them as the characters there were portraying and after a while I was completely hooked and not least of all because I was fascinated by all the questions that came to mind as I watched the families go through the daily routines of living in the cold north. But of course by the story too, the themes of evil, service and duty to the community, the danger of amibition for personal power/gain, love of family, romantic love, and the betrayal of both of those loves and all that good old human stuff!

Mainly Italian, French and Japanese. I'm currently going through a Fellini phase.

growing up I liked going to the movies well enough but they never really meant anything to me. But since discovering older films from the 40s and 50s and Foreign films I've become a bit of a film buff.

Amazing what happens when a person gets exposed to something that is done well and contains Interesting, challenging (in a good entertaining way) material.

If you need any recommendations (foreign or domestic), let me know. :hi:

:D

No, but really, that film KICKS ASS!

just Canadian English eh. ;)

The remote location made editing difficult and
would have killed the budget.

The language is Inuktitut, an Inuit or Inupik dialect one of four
in the arctic spanning from Alaska to Greenland

Inupiaq or Inupiat (northern Alaska, 3,500 speakers)
Inuvialuktun (western Canada, 765 speakers)
Inuktitut (eastern Canada; together with Inuktun and Inuinnaqtun, 30,000 speakers)
Kalaallisut (Greenland, 47,000 speakers)

I spent my graduate school years on a campus that had four film societies, so during my impossibly long grad school career, I saw almost all the most famous classic movies.

Now that I'm on Netflix, I see a whole slew of movies that even I haven't seen. There are over 300 disks in my queue already, the Fast Runner being one of them, although to be fair, some of them are multi-disk TV series.

Foreign films were considered really hip and cool in the 1960s and 1970s and tended to get a lot of publicity, but now they're harder to find. If there's an international film festival in your city, I suggest going to it. You will see some great flicks that will never find a distributor in the U.S.

I can ping for suggestions.

One problem I do have is so far it's been pretty hit or miss with me, in terms of finding films to watch, I don't really know where to look for the next one.

I enjoyed it - not many people have seen it and it deserves a wider audience. I loved the women's tattoos.

of it all. The actors performed all sorts of daily tasks like cleaning skins for example and it was clear they actually knew what they were doing and had skilled hands.

At one point I wondered at all the butchering being shown, a main stream American film would not likely have scenes like that and it did momentarily occure to me that this was wrong to be butchering these animals just for the movie. But I thought it was unlikely these actors and crew were cutting up a seal or bird and then going off to a catered, expensive buffet table for lunch. And sure enough at the end of the DVD they say that any animal seen being prepared for food in the movie was indeed used for food as well as the skins, bones etc... used for whatever the people still use them for.

Not going to get that kind of authenticity in most (any?) Hollywood film.

thanks for the reminder. It was a great film.