Nirilaurta: Let Us Eat
2026 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Malaya Qaunirq Chapman
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
In Taloyoak, Nunavut, families facing steep grocery prices and costly hunting draw on Inuit knowledge, the land, and kinship to feed their community.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a doc about food scarcity to wring your heart—this one refuses that cheap catharsis and instead lets kinship and land knowledge speak without narration or sentiment, which is genuinely rarer than it should be.
Cousineau and Chapman situate this film in the lineage of observational documentary that trusts community voice and ritual over intervention, with editing that honors both the deliberate pace of subsistence and the formal rigor of ensemble portraiture.
The film's restraint—letting the camera stay still while hands and voices move through the work of feeding—transforms what could be a policy brief into something tactile and relational, a single formal choice that makes the difference.