Our Land, Our Truth
1983 · 54m · Canada
Directed by Maurice Bulbulian
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Inuit dissidents in Povungnituk, Ivujivik and Sugluk who rejected the 1975 James Bay agreement explain their determination to keep their land and traditions rather than surrender rights to nearly a million square kilometres.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 54-minute doc about land rights sounds like public broadcasting wallpaper, but Bulbulian flips the expected narrative by centering the dissenters—the ones who said no to the James Bay settlement when everyone else capitulated—which is the kind of willful historical revisionism that makes consensus documentary look toothless.
Bulbulian situates this within the vital lineage of Indigenous documentary testimony and archival activism, where the formal restraint of letting Inuit voices occupy the center becomes a curatorial statement; the film knows exactly what it owes to the National Film Board tradition while refusing to settle for it.
The decision to structure this around the *rejected* agreement rather than the signed one—to privilege the voices of those who walked away—is a single editorial choice that inverts the entire documentary register, turning what could've been a straightforward historical record into something that lives in productive contradiction.