Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak
1963 · 19m · Canada
Directed by John Feeney
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak draws images that carvers transfer to stone and print for sale in Kinngait. The film follows her role as the first woman in the community's printmaking co-operative.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1963 NFB doc about an Inuit printmaker sounds like the most agreeable, establishment-friendly thing imaginable—and it probably is, which is exactly why it bores me; give me the messy, contradictory Kenojuak that doesn't fit the heroic-first-woman narrative.
Feeney positions Ashevak within a specific moment in Canadian documentary practice and Inuit cultural production, where the camera's tender restraint becomes a formal argument about witnessing rather than extracting—this is cinema aware of its own colonial gaze.
The decision to let Kenojuak's hands and the blank page do the talking, rather than chase her face or story, is what makes a straightforward biographical premise feel alive; that negative space is everything.