The Hunters (Asivaqtiin)
1977 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Mosha Michael
Genres: documentary, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Inuk filmmaker Mosha Michael documents a three-week Frobisher Bay hunting trip where young offenders and their families fish, hunt seal and caribou, and rebuild family and community bonds.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to canonize this as healing-through-land doctrine, but Michael's actually doing something weirder—the film refuses emotional payoff, lets the hunt stay opaque, treats 'redemption' like a word that doesn't quite fit. It's the anti-uplift doc, and 1977 was too early for people to realize that's what made it radical.
A foundational work in Indigenous documentary cinema that positions observation itself as a formal and ethical act; Michael's restraint—the unhurried pacing, the refusal to narrativize—situates this firmly in the ethnographic tradition while asserting Indigenous authorship of that gaze, a lineage question that still matters.
The decision to shoot in real time across three weeks, to let silences breathe instead of scoring them, creates this almost unbearable intimacy where you're not watching a story being told but *present* for something—that commitment to duration over drama is what separates document from documentary.