If the Weather Permits
2003 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Elisapie Isaac
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In Kangirsujuaq, Nunavik, filmmaker Elisapie Isaac reflects on elders mourning a fading hunting culture and youth drawn to southern life, addressing her late grandfather about bridging the generations.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a film about cultural erosion to genuflect to authenticity and loss—Isaac just talks to her grandfather like a person, lets the hunting stories breathe without scoring them as tragedy, and somehow that refusal to perform grief is more radical than any formal stunt would be.
This is essay film in its most rigorous form: a filmmaker in conversation with her own archive and lineage, using the intimate address to an absent elder as both structural spine and ethical method—the kind of work that justifies the form precisely because the form *is* the argument.
The decision to frame this as a one-sided conversation—speaking directly to her grandfather—transforms what could be observational anthropology into something confessional and urgent; that single formal choice makes the generational rift feel lived rather than documented.