"“Before Tomorrow” is set in 1840 at the perilous moment when white explorers with their strange customs and implements began encroaching on the far north territory occupied by Inuit tribes that had little or no contact with the outside world. This visually transfixing movie is the third in a trilogy that began with the ancient Inuit folk tale “The Fast Runner” (“Atanarjuat”) and continued with “The Journals of Knud Rasmussen,” set in the early 1920s. Directed by Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu and based on a novel by the Danish writer Jorn Riel, the movie is a product of Arnait Video Productions, the Women’s Video Workshop of Igloolik. It is the only film in this series to focus on women’s roles as storytellers and repositories of folk wisdom; its perspective might be described as Inuit feminist. The film’s benign, nurturing ethos is accentuated by the contribution of the French-Canadian singer-songwriters Kate and Anna McGarrigle, whose searching folk ballad “Why Must We Die?” bookends the film. The lyrics, which begin, “We are meat, we are spirit/We have blood and we have grace,” evoke an ideal balance of flesh and spirit within a culture in harmony with nature in which the living seek counsel from the dead. Although it is one of the McGarrigles’ finest songs, the imposition of a contemporary folk ballad still doesn’t quite mesh with the film’s portrayal of an insular, in some ways prehistoric culture that even as late as 1840 had changed little over many centuries. Where “The Fast Runner,” the most powerful film of the trilogy, told a tough tale of dissension within a tribe, “Before Tomorrow” succumbs to ethnographic sentimentality in its idyllic depiction of the same world threatened by evil from outside. It tells the story of Ningiuq (Ms. Piujuq Ivalu), a wise old woman, who, with her lifetime friend Kutuujuk (Mary Qulitalik) and 10-year-old grandson, Maniq (Paul-Dylan Ivalu), is transported by kayak to a remote island to spend the final weeks of a bountiful summer drying salmon and caribou meat for the coming winter." Get the Story:
Review: Before Tomorrow (The New York Times 12/2)