User Reviews

An ancient way of life is struggling to survive on the fringes of the Greenlandic icecap.

This quiet documentary introduces us to the Inuit settlement of Niaqornat, population 59, which for millennia has hunted seal, whale, and walrus in the island's western fjords, lighting its homes with burning blubber until 1988, when electricity arrived. (The internet has inevitably followed.)

Here we meet some of the important people in the village. Town fathers are working to revive a fish-processing factory that could prevent eventual abandonment of Niaqornat. Then there's the cheery bucket man who collects sewage from colorful, boxy homes along the fjord.

Niaqornat's oldest male, raised on fruits of the sea, is quite an endearing character, admitting with a grin, "I'm not very interested in vegetables; (they're) like grass." The local teacher, asking his soft-spoken students about their dreams, tells a kid who wants to be a pilot that he'll have to get good at English and go abroad to study.

Most compelling is a lonely teenager named Lars who dislikes blood and eschews a hunter's life. In his frustration, he carves amulets -- "When you have bad feelings, you want to replace them, and you create tupilaks," he says -- and by film's end, he's lifting off in a chopper in search of love and culture in larger Uummannaq.

Icebergs shimmer exquisitely in sparkling waters, as locals lament that the ice is thinner than in the past, making polar-bear sighting rare. Still, the filmmakers capture applauding villagers on shore as a hunter returns with a freshly butchered white ursine, whose meat is distributed to all.

The matriarch of the village quietly scoffs at a photo of "silly lady" Brigitte Bardot, whom she says "damages fur sales."

Despite challenges posed by climate and globalization, the quest for survival continues, leaving one worried wife to admit, "I remain hopeful while I wait."

Will a shrinking world help to save this unique environment? We observe how a couple-dozen tourists are ferried from a cruise ship and buy little gifts of handcrafts and such. They seem quietly respectful, and let's hope they stay that way.

One wishes this hardy community well.

Directed by Sarah Gavron, and set in a tiny village nestled upon the North Western coast of Greenland, "Village at the End of the World" watches as beleaguered locals attempt to cope with the closing of a halibut factory owned by the Royal Greenland fisheries company. When the factory shuts down, livelihoods are terminated with it.

Overlong and slight, "Village" is preoccupied with the effects of modernity and globalisation. The village's tiny Inuit population relies on the employment generated by outside mega-corporations, on the arrival of massive freighters for supplies, and local kids spend much of their time logging into Facebook, wearing Liverpool FC jerseys, playing with Google Earth, cyber-dating and listening to foreign hip-hop acts.

Toward the second half of the film, Gavron captures the way in which technology simultaneously alienates and connects, simultaneously shrinks and expands worlds. More depressingly, technology induces lamentations based on fantasies and promises it cannot fully provide. Through media and machines, Inuits are granted a window to another possible world, but never the means to actually touch and taste that which lies beyond their village. Ignorance, for many, is bliss.

Unsurprisingly, local kids find themselves dwelling on suicide, or mourning their inability to extricate themselves from their tiny village. Elsewhere Greenlandic communities are disintegrating, the local Inuit population under siege; huskies outnumber humans 10 to 1 and the local school has only eight kids.

"The way of the Inuit is to struggle with nature and to live sustainably from its fruits," one fisherman says. Their existence is a constant battle, but one can't help but be enamoured by the beautiful landscapes amidst which they toil. Surrounded by vast oceans, limitless skies and rolling hills peppered with multicoloured houses perched upon concrete and stilts, this little Greenlandic village is never anything less than breathtaking.

7.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Chasing Ice" and "A Year in the Taiga".