Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos Screening II: Rediscovering the Arctic Archive I

• Event Date: Friday, August 28, 2015
• Time: 5:00 pm–7:30 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Film

Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos examines documentary cinema as a key to contextualizing environmental, indigenous, political, cultural, sociological and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic. This event is the first major international conference to address the Arctic Documentary tradition.

Introduction and Q&A by Kevin Nikkel of Five Door Films

Released two years before the film that came to define the genres of both documentary and Arctic filmmaking, Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (USA, 1922), Wyckhoff's The Romance of the Far Fur Country depicts both Hudson's Bay Company’s outposts — the world's leading fur trade company at the time — and the Inuit who inhabit the land. Recently restored and not seen in over 80 years, The Romance of the Far Fur Country was produced by the Hudson's Bay Company to celebrate its 250th anniversary and was the first feature length documentary produced in the Canadian Arctic. In subsequent years, the feature was divided up into short films, those also long buried in archives.