Before Tomorrow

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      Starring Madeline Ivalu and Paul-Dylan Ivalu. In Inuktitut with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, March 27, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

      In 1922, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, a half-condescending, half-affectionate portrait of an “Eskimo” family struggling to survive on the shores of Hudson Bay, established a template for ethnographic cinema that would stand until Jean Rouch democratically undermined it.


      Watch the trailer for Before Tomorrow.

      Eighty years later, Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, an epic set in the days before Europeans even knew there was such a thing as the “New World”, won the Camera d’or at the Cannes Film Festival.

      Thus, in a mere eight decades, Inuit cinema not only “came of age” but looked like the “next big thing”.

      Although this impression might have been transitory, there’s no denying that Atanarjuat kick-started Northern filmmaking. Before Tomorrow is the latest entry in this highly specialized subgenre.

      Based on a Danish novel and made by the women of the Arnait Video collective, the film is set in 1840 and deals with the earliest contacts between Europeans and Inuit (even if the whites remain invisible). In Arctic summer, an elderly woman (Madeline Ivalu, who is also one of the film’s writers, directors, and producers) and her eight-year-old grandson (Paul-Dylan Ivalu) travel to an isolated island to dry fish. They expect their relatives to show up shortly, but nobody does. Eventually, they discover why and must deal with the consequences.

      To call the content of this drama “tragic” would be an understatement. We should be left sobbing, but the filmmakers’ quest for personal authenticity (oral storytelling practices being preferred to dynamic dramatic development) leaves the outside viewer feeling, well, cold.

      Full marks for plastic beauty (in some respects, Before Tomorrow is even more ravishing than Kunuk’s masterpiece) and ethnic integrity clearly must be granted unstintingly. Unfortunately, they aren’t enough to fully compensate for an awkward story arc or an emotionally unsatisfying denouement.

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