Like Andrew Qappik
2005 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Jane Churchill
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Inuit printmaker Andrew Qappik demonstrates soapstone relief printing for students in Pangnirtung, then guides them to explore symbolic imagery through self-portrait prints of their own.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight documentary about an artist teaching printmaking—competent, wholesome, exactly the kind of thing everyone expects from the NFB. Where's the subversion? Where's the formal provocation? This is craft-as-comfort, not craft-as-interrogation.
Churchill understands the lineage of documentary pedagogy—the Griersonian tradition of ordinary work elevated through patient observation—and here she locates genuine formal rigor in the restraint of the frame, letting the act of mark-making and self-discovery unfold without interference, the kind of measured pacing that rewards attention.
The decision to let the students' hands and their emerging prints carry the narrative weight, rather than rely on talking-head explanation, is what makes this breathe—you watch confidence literally take shape on stone, and that tactile specificity of the medium becomes the film's emotional core.