Our Northern Citizen
1956 · 30m · Canada
Directed by John Howe
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
New developments reshape life for Inuit on Baffin Island, while residents react to the decision to relocate the settlement of Aklavik across the Mackenzie River.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A mid-century NFB doc about Inuit relocation sounds like the most consensus-friendly archival piece imaginable—and that's exactly why Howe's restraint is quietly radical, letting the camera linger on what bureaucrats wanted erased rather than narrate it into submission.
Howe positions himself in the documentary tradition of bearing witness without intervention, and the formal choice to let landscape and lived experience speak before any official voice arrives grounds this in a lineage of post-war humanist cinema that still feels rare.
The decision to shoot in contemplative long takes rather than cut between talking heads or propaganda footage becomes the film's moral argument—each sustained image of Inuit life insists on duration, on presence, against the velocity of imposed change.