Nunavut Animation Lab : I Am But a Little Woman

"I am but a little woman / Very willing to toil..." - Kivkarjuk's Song Inspired by an Inuit poem first assigned to paper in 1927, I Am But a Little Woman wordlessly evokes the beauty and power of nature, as well as the bond between mother and daughter. As her daughter looks on, an Inuit woman creates a wall hanging filled with images of the spectacular Arctic landscape and traditional Inuit objects and iconography. Soon the boundaries between art and reality begin to dissolve. I Am But a Little Woman features director Gyu Oh's hand-drawn animation set to a traditional tune, which she performs.

Lumaajuuq is a tragic and twisted story about the dangers of revenge. A cruel mother mistreats her son, feeding him dog meat and forcing him to sleep in the cold. A loon, who tells the boy that his mother blinded him, helps the child regain his eyesight. Then the boy seeks revenge, releasing his mother's lifeline as she harpoons a whale and watching her drown. As the boy's sister cries over the fate of their mother, the boy realizes the futility of seeking vengeance. Alethea Arnaquq-Baril uses graceful digital animation to retell this story, based on a portion of the epic Inuit legend "The Blind Boy and the Loon.".

A self-important colonial explorer emerges from a sailing ship and plants a flag on the Arctic ice, as a bemused Inuit hunter looks on. Then the explorer plants another, and another, and another, while the hunter, clearly not impressed that his land has been "discovered," quietly goes about his business. In this charming and humorous re-imagining of first contact between Inuit and European, Jonathan Wright brings us the story of a savvy hunter and the ill-equipped explorer he outwits.