Three Thousand
2017 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Asinnajaq
Genres: animation, documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
Inuk artist Asinnajaq weaves NFB archive footage, from newsreels and ethnographic films to work by Indigenous filmmakers, into original animation to reimagine how Inuit past, present and future have been represented on screen.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Asinnajaq takes the archive—that sacred cow of institutional cinema—and doesn't burn it down so much as redistribute it, which is somehow more radical; the surrealism isn't performance, it's decolonization wearing animation's mask.
A masterwork of archival curation and formal restraint, where every splice and animated intervention sits in conscious dialogue with documentary lineage and Indigenous cinema's emerging canon; this is how you make a essay-film that argues through aesthetic inheritance.
The decision to animate *over* rather than against the found footage—letting the archive breathe underneath new gestures—transforms what could've been a polemical collage into something that feels intimate and excavatory; that restraint is everything.