Yesterday - Today: The Netsilik Eskimo
1971 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Gilles Blais
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
This film spends a day with Inuit hunter Zachary Itimignac and his family in the Pelly Bay region, examining how government-provided housing, schooling, health care, and transport have transformed their formerly nomadic life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to mourn the 'vanishing' Inuit—this film does too, but it's so *patient* about it, so formally restrained, that it somehow becomes a quiet fuck-you to the usual anthropological hand-wringing; watching Zachary move through government-issued life with the same grace he'd use hunting feels subversive precisely because the film refuses to editorialise.
Blais's observational restraint and the film's deliberate pacing situate it squarely in the best tradition of direct cinema—a rigorous formal choice that lets contradiction breathe without comment, allowing the tension between tradition and imposed modernity to live in the frame rather than the voiceover.
The decision to follow a single day without voiceover or explanatory apparatus means every mundane transition—from tent to prefab house, from hunting to school—becomes its own argument, and that structural choice carries more weight than any funding could buy.