InukShop
2009 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Jobie Weetaluktuk
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Filmmaker Jobie Weetaluktuk combines archival and contemporary footage to comment on how Inuit culture has been appropriated throughout history.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of archival collage sounds like exactly the kind of footnote I'd skip, but Weetaluktuk's sleight-of-hand—layering then destabilizing appropriation itself—catches you doing the thing you're being shown. It's smuggler's work.
A formally rigorous essay film that inherits from a lineage of Indigenous counter-archival practice; the decision to let historical footage speak against itself, rather than narrate over it, positions this as essential curatorial cinema—brief but architecturally complete.
The entire film hinges on one structural choice: trusting the friction between what's shown and what's hidden to do the cultural work, with zero explanatory scaffolding. That restraint, especially at 2 minutes, is what makes the appropriation visible.