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Press Conference New York Film Festival for:

THE JOURNALS OF KNUD RASMUSSEN
Series: The 44th New York Film Festival [Sept 29 - Oct 15 2006]
Director: Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, Country: Canada, Release: 2006, Runtime: 112

Between 1920 and 1924, the Danish/Inuit explorer and scientist Knud Rasmussen led five expeditions through Arctic North America from his trade station in Thule, Greenland. Along the way, he and his team befriended the great shaman Aua and his family, and documented what was in the end a pivotal moment in Igloolik culture: Slowly encroaching foreign trade, the impending murder investigation of a white man, and the unstoppable spread of Christianity converged to alter customs and shatter taboos that had been in place for centuries.

Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, the team that brought you The Fast Runner (ND/NF ’02), have created something altogether wondrous with their new film, in which fiction and documentary, ethnography and myth, are joined in concert. A richly textured and beautifully hand-crafted movie, Journals performs the remarkable feat of immersing us in a way of life and simultaneously dramatizing its threatened extinction.