"I want you to ask her stuff that will make her angry so she can tell you real things."

Yesterday I mentioned hearing Lucie Idlout's "Birthday" on CBC's Unreserved. After the post I went looking for more on Idlout and found Alan Zweig's documentary There is a House Here (2017). Idlout and Zweig met on the phone five years prior to the making of the film and kept up a correspondence. Eventually Idlout invited Zweig to visit her in Iqaluit, Nunavit, which she had described to Zweig as "a fucking Third World." There is a House Here is the story of these visits, but of course it is more than that.

I have not read the reviews of There is a House Here, nor do I have any idea how the documentary was received in Nunavut and beyond. I am sure there are those who refuse the film because it was made by a non-Inuk filmmaker, just as there are those who assess it less on its attempt to depict or represent the Inuit and their relationship to the Government of Canada than as a lesson in the documentary form. Idlout is with Zweig throughout the making of this film, taking him and his crew to visit those who Idlout thinks Zweig should be speaking with.

For me the most compelling part of the film comes at 103:00, when Idlout takes Zweig to visit Marie, a woman of Idlout's mother's generation who "always takes good care of me ... we go out hunting together, we go out fishing together ... she's a spitfire and that's why I wanted you to speak to her, because she's real." But when the conversation doesn't go as Idlout wants it to, she intervenes, and in her frustration we see something of Idlout's gyres.