In this film Claude Massot brought to the screen his vision of the first film documentary, Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North." From start to finish, this film is a constellation of brilliantly choreographed performances, both by the professional actors and by the Inuit who are cast in native roles. Harsh, frozen vistas are polished to crystalline perfection through cinematography as pure and sharp as Japanese calligraphy. Charles Dance and Adamie Q. Inukpuk bring enormous strength and essential restraint to their roles as Flaherty, the "Kabloonak", or stranger, and Nanook, two utterly unalike men made brothers by their struggle through an arctic lunarscape to film the hunt of a polar bear. Inukpuk's Nanook is not a primitive, but a complex human living in bitterly primitive conditions. Dance turns in one of the finest performances of his screen career as Flaherty, a geologist and former prospector who made the film of his dreams, yet turned down offers to make another such motion picture. Charles Dance, Cinematographers Jacques Loiseleux and François Protat, and Sebastian Regnier's score all have won international gold medals for their work in "Kabloonak."
