The story
Founded by Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk in 1990.1
In 1999, the company filmed and produced the supernatural historical thriller Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. It was a box-office success around the world, and won the Caméra d'Or for Best First Feature Film at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, six Genie Awards (including Best Picture), and several other international film awards. The film had its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001.
The massive critical success of Atanarjuat led to funding from Telefilm Canada, enabling Isuma to begin development on multiple scripts. One of these, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, about the switch from shamanism to Christianity in Igloolik in the early 1920s, received the offer to open the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006.
In 2011, Isuma filed for receivership, citing $750,000 in debts, including $500,000 to Atuqtuarvik Corp. of Rankin Inlet. A Montreal-based receiver, RSM Richter, put the company’s assets—most notably its film library—up for sale.
Isuma Productions uses multimedia processes to address Inuit and indigenous issues, and the role of community in society. The organization asserts that wealth in the New World was extracted from Aboriginal citizens, who are among the lowest-income populations in these countries. While the Inuit of Fast Runner are depicted in a church, the Inuit of The Journals are represented in contemporary news stories as living in impoverished areas within wealthy nations.
Historically, how a country treats its indigenous people is an excellent gauge of its social and political views on humanism in general; what happens to the indigenous peoples of any given country is a sign of what will eventually happen to the dominant culture in time. Even today the law, education, religion and media continue to efface living memories of Aboriginal cultural history. As Norman Cohn says,
Save the seals and Save the bears seems more attractive than Save the people, but unless the rights of humans to live in their habitat are more widely recognized and protected it's a little fatuous to even dream about saving birds and animals.
Isuma aims to increase awareness and focus about and for indigenous peoples of all cultures, not just Northern Canada, through encouraging multimedia approaches. Their goal is to ensure that these rights are not compartmentalized, but rather include the awareness of human rights in a larger cultural and holistic context: through exploration of spirituality, globalization, environmentalism, cinema, world media, and Native awareness.
Reception
In the 1990s, films were shown locally and then broadcast across the Arctic on Television Northern Canada (TVNC), and Aboriginal People's Television Network (APT), which began in 1999 and broadcast the series as part of its original programming shown across all parts of Canada. Eventually, the individual films, as well as the Nunavut series, achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim, winning awards in Canada, France, Peru, the United States, Spain, Taiwan, and Japan.
Read the full text
In January 2021, Isuma launched Uvagut TV, Canada's first national Inuktut television channel, and is currently available across Canada.
The collective platform for Isuma currently carries over 6,000 videos in more than 80 different languages, on 800+ user-controlled channels, representing cultures and media organizations from Canada, U.S.A., Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and all over Latin America. Users register and open their own platforms and upload their own content. This way, Isuma notes, people can use their media to recover language and traditional indigenous strengths and transform them into contemporary strengths.
As Canada's first Inuit independent production company, Isuma's mission claims to create a distinctive Inuit style of community-based filmmaking that preserves and enhances Inuit culture, creates needed employment, and offers a uniquely Inuit point of view to the global media audience.
Isuma's goal is to delight other Inuit, and to connect with a global media audience. Isuma's videos, films, and Internet projects demonstrate how a community can appropriate communication tools to serve their own cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic purposes of Inuit culture. These audiovisual representations also enable Canadians to connect more directly with the images and their Inuit creators, and to establish a distinct and authentic Inuit voice within a global media discourse.
From Wikipedia’s article on Isuma, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4