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Into Unknown Parts
2017
Video, 25min, co-directed with Eduardo Kohn
Photo Credit: Doug Wilkinson/National Film Board of Canada/Library and Archives Canada/PA-176872

Into Unknown Parts visually and sonically captures the Inuit experience of being forced to leave their home communities and live for an undetermined period of time in a southern sanatorium. Without minimizing the humanitarian crisis the TB epidemic posed for the Canadian State, this film explores the experience of rupture and dislocation caused by these policies.  Rather than a straightforward expository narrative, it seeks to capture one of the most striking aspects of this dislocation: the way the possibility of communication, verbal and non-verbal, was actually put into question. Inuit often found that words escaped them when they tried to write or send spoken messages across the miles that now separated them from their families. The words they did send to each other were often met by silence: letters and tapes lost in transit, the recipient dying before the letters arrived. In some cases the silence persists today. In the case of those who never returned, family members still hold out hope that they will someday hear news of their whereabouts.

Screenings:
Ethnographic Exploratory, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, December 16, 2019.

Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, April 11, 2018.

Margaret Mead Film Festival, American Museum of Natural History, October 22, 2017

Anthropocinema, George Washington University, Department of Anthropology, March 23, 2017 (with discussion via Skype).

Department of Anthropology, Duke University, January 23, 2017 (with discussion).

Department of Anthropology, New York University, December 1, 2016 (with discussion).

Visual Anthropology Working Group, Department of Anthropology, History and the Humanities, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Quito, April 1, 2016 (with discussion).

Department of Anthropology, Colegio de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad San Francisco, Quito, May 2, 2016 (with discussion).

“The Arts in Cultural Psychiatry: Identity, Creativity and Transformation.” Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, June 1-3, 2015 (with discussion).