Vision Man

Utuniarsuak Avike is an Eskimo of 87 years old, a hunter living in Thule, in the northwest of Greenland. With a bizarre sense of humour and the greatest possible naturalness towards the camera (he addresses the audience directly), Utuniarsuak tells about the life that lies behind him. Parallels with NANOOK OF THE NORTH, the famous Eskimo documentary that Robert Flaherty made in 1922, are obvious. Utuniarsuak tells how he became an orphan at a young age because his parents had succumbed to tuberculosis. The disease was introduced on the island by European whale hunters. He also remembers how Greenland was proclaimed a Danish colony in 1932 and how the inhabitants of the Thule district were given a family name for the first time in their lives (until then Greenlanders had had only a single name), for registering purposes. Danish was introduced as the official language, which explains why today only a few hundred Thulians still speak the original dialect of the district. The originally Australian filmmaker William Long is living and working in Sweden as a cameraman. He specialises in films in the polar region. He made his debut as a filmmaker in 1992 with the natural history film RETURN OF THE LIGHT. VISION MAN is his second non-fiction film.