In the Arctic North, Human Emotion and Courage

“The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)” is the cinematic equivalent of adventure travel. Nearly three hours long and deliberately paced at that, this first feature ever in the Inuit language is a demanding experience. But the rewards for those who risk the journey are simply extraordinary.

“The Fast Runner” does more than use a previously unheard language, does more than cast a spell with its mind-expanding panoramas. The film deposits you deep within the compelling, unfamiliar culture of the native people of the Arctic North. And it tells a story of elemental passions, a mythic tale of courage and mendacity, of undying love and corrosive lust that can’t help but hold our interest.

The society of the Inuit (the word means “a man, preeminently”) has fascinated those in more hospitable climes at least since Robert Flaherty’s 1922 “Nanook of the North” and “Kabloona,” Gontran de Poncins’ marvelous 1941 memoir of what was then called Eskimo life. But it’s never before been presented from the inside and in so persuasive a way that the film won the Camera d’Or for best first feature at Cannes and six Genies, the Canadian Oscar, including best picture and best director.

Although this is the first feature for director Zacharias Kunuk, he has since 1990 had his own television and video production company, based in the 1,200-person hamlet of Igloolik in Canada’s Nunavut Territory, where this film was shot. And the venerable nature of “The Fast Runner’s” story, an oral narrative forever in the heads and on the lips of his people, has given the production a confidence and assurance unusual for a first-timer from a culture without a filmmaking tradition.

Paul Apak Angilirq, “The Fast Runner’s” screenwriter, had eight elders tell him their versions of this ancient Inuit story, set in an indefinite past when Europeans were not even a rumor, when spirits could take physical form and when men who were to become myths were still merely human.

“The Fast Runner’s” story of the pervasiveness of evil and the power of taboos begins when a malignant shaman visits a small Inuit clan and infects it with dissension and death, including the murder of the clan chief. “It just happened,” someone explains, baffled, powerless, “and we had to live with it.”

Because at first glance the film’s characters dress alike and resemble one another, and because the beginning of the story unfolds in a deliberately fractured way, the opening sections of “The Fast Runner” are as confusing as things would be if we personally found ourselves in that foreign a situation. And Kunuk’s unhurried pacing, his decision to duplicate the temporal rhythms of Inuit culture, make a willingness to give yourself over to the experience on its own terms essential.

But just as travelers acclimate to strange surroundings, less than an hour into the film everything comes into focus, and the story, which now remains in a single period with well-defined characters, gets increasingly involving.

At its heart, this is about two brothers with great powers. Amaqjuaa (Pakak Innukshuk) is the older and stronger, but Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq), the title character, is the fleeter of foot. He and Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu) fall in love, but she is promised in marriage to the sullen Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq), son of the clan’s evil leader. Complicating things even more is that Oki’s sister, the fey Puja (Lucy Tulugarjuk), has eyes only for the fast runner. Norman Cohn, the film’s cinematographer, said, “The film is about love, jealousy, murder and revenge. What else is there?”

Actually, there is a good deal more, starting with Cohn’s compelling cinematography. Though “The Fast Runner” was shot on wide-screen digital video (then transferred to 35 millimeter), the images are nevertheless truly breathtaking--pictures that also tell the indelible story of what it feels like to be frail humans in an immense natural world. And the film’s signature sequence, Atanarjuat running naked across the snow with his life in jeopardy, is simply a knockout.

“The Fast Runner” has paid equal attention to painstakingly constructing the physical world its people live in, creating a living record of a culture that’s threatened with extinction. Not just tools and clothes, but also songs and dances, bawdy customs and deadly serious rituals--ways of being in the world--are vividly reproduced.

Because the story, performers and landscape are so unfamiliar, everything combines in “The Fast Runner” to create a film that does not feel acted and rather as if it is simply happening in front of our eyes. This is so much the case that, when the closing credits are run next to documentary shots of the film’s crew at work, it comes as a shock to see how the artifice was put together.

At the film’s beginning, one of the tellers of this tale says, “I can only sing this song to someone who understands it.” What’s special about “The Fast Runner” is that by its epic close, the select group includes us.

No MPAA rating. Times guidelines: one scene of lovemaking and several of violence.

‘The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)’

Natar Ungalaaq ... Atanarjuat

Sylvia Ivalu... Atuat

Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq ... Oki

Lucy Tulugarjuk...Puja

An Igloolik Isuma Productions presentation, in co-production with National Film Board of Canada, released by Lot 47 Films. Director Zacharias Kunuk. Producers Paul Apak Angilirq, Norman Cohn, Zacharias Kunuk, Germaine Ying Gee Wong. Executive producer Sally Bochner. Screenplay Paul Apak Angilirq. Cinematographer Norman Cohn. Editors Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn, Marie-Christine Sarda. Costumes Micheline Ammaq, Atuat Akkitirq. Music Chris Crilly. Art director James Ungalaaq. In Inuit, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 52 minutes.

In limited release.