The Greenlanders
1973 · 37m · Canada
Directed by Hubert Schuurman
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Greenland's Inuit were moved into centralized coastal settlements so Denmark could deliver housing, health care and other services more easily, a policy examined here for northern peoples and officials in Canada facing similar development questions.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a bureaucratic procedural dressed as anthropology—the real subversion isn't that Denmark relocated an entire people, it's that Schuurman treats the contradiction between 'progress' and erasure as a *question* rather than an answer, which is either brilliantly restrained or infuriatingly polite depending on your mood.
Schuurman positions this film in the lineage of committed essay documentaries—Marker, Farocki—where the formal apparatus (archival footage, official testimony, geographic observation) becomes the argument itself, and the 37 minutes feels precisely calibrated, each element in conversation with a larger tradition of cinema examining state logic.
The singular choice here is structural: by running parallel interviews with the displaced Greenlanders and the Canadian officials facing the same relocation policy, Schuurman forces the viewer into the position of comparing two versions of the same colonial logic in real time, and that formal decision does all the ethical work.