Lumaajuuq curses her own son blind with dirty whale fat

Unfortunately today (well, yesterday now that it’s after midnight) I had to leave the imagineNATIVE festival a few hours early to catch my flight to Ottawa, so i could get home in time to prepare for the world broadcast premiere of my first solo feature doc, Tunniit: Retracing the Lines of Inuit Tattoos on APTN.

Three canceled flights and several delays later, after NINE hours of sitting around the Toronto Island airport, I’ve arrived in Ottawa at 2AM.  Okay, I’m very used to flight delays and cancellations when I travel within Nunavut, but this is the first time I’ve had a flight canceled out of Toronto due to weather!!! The fog didn’t even look that bad to me… I swear a pilot with Canadian or First Air would have been able to handle that amount of fog, Hehehe. Oh well, at least I’ll still catch my morning flight back to Iqaluit, even if I do look like a zombie.

Anyways, I received a nice surprise when I got a text message from Rob Lackie (Labrador Inuk on the board of the imagineNATIVE festival) congratulating me on my win for “best Canadian short drama” for Lumaajuuq, the animation I did with the NFB and IBC. I didn’t know I was up for the award, so I was really surprised and happy. Then I was really annoyed with myself for not sticking around for the last few hours of the festival, especially since my flight was canceled anyway!

Thanks again to the imagineNATIVE fest for taking such good care of us, and a huge thanks for the award. I’ve worked on other award winning productions, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever personally gotten an award for my very own project.  🙂

A big old fat squishy hug and shout out goes to Dan Gies who did such amazing animation and music, and kudos for the fantastic narration work by Rachel Whitewind (english version) and Beatrice Deer (inuktitut version). And of course thanks to the NFB, IBC and the Banff Centre for giving me the opportunity to tell the story of the blind boy and the loon.

Woohoo!

p.s. I look forward to someday doing a full animated series on the same story. It’s a huge epic legend, and although I was able to squeeze a small section of it into my short animation, it really needs to be done on a full scale to give it the treatment it deserves. Someday… when we have more trained Inuit animators and production crew to be able to make it happen.