Recreating the World of the Thule
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Making a documentary about a people who lived a millennium ago presents a problem: how to bring their world alive on a modest budget. Doing this in the High Arctic, on the sea, presents a serious problem.
The Thule Inuit were masters of the Arctic seas. Two remarkable abilities - hunting for 80-ton bowhead whales and navigating vast distances on water - relied on their incredible whaleboats. Preparing to shoot the recreations in Inuit Odyssey, we knew that finding a traditional whaleboat and a crew to sail it would be the biggest challenge. Fortunately, our Producer and "adventurer" Niobe Thompson was intimately familiar with one particular part of the Circumpolar North where the whaleboat-building tradition is still alive: Chukotka, in Northeast Russia. This is the most isolated region in the Russian Arctic, and partly for that reason, its indigenous reindeer herders and sea-mammal hunters follow truly subsistence ways of life. Among herder and hunters in Chukotka, the modern world seems effortlessly to mimic the ancient past: a superb opportunity for our documentary.
The cast of Thule was drawn from the modern Inuit community of Novoe Chaplino
The autumn before shooting began, Thompson contacted an Inuit (Yu'pik) hunting brigade in the remote community of Novoe Chaplino, on the Russian Bering Strait. There, he found a master boat builder who agreed to assemble a baidarai whaleboat, and by late spring 2008, a wooden frame was ready to receive its walrus-skin covering. The skin itself was prepared in another village two days travel by boat to the north; from a young walrus cow, it was carefully split to half its thickness by hand, and soaked in salt water for days before stretching. Our crew arrived in time to film the actual stretching and tethering, a process that takes a skilled builder two sleepless days to complete before the skin dries hard. Incredibly, a single walrus hide covers an entire 24-foot baidara.
Making a baidarai whaleboat
The baidara was only one of many props and locations that we prepared for our recreations. In Novoe Chaplino, we constructed a traditional Thule sod house, complete with rafters made of the jawbones of grey whales (local Inuit have not hunted for the massive bowhead whale for generations). We collected reindeer and sealskin clothing from nomadic reindeer herding brigades in the mountainous interior. Our Thule explorers also travelled with 24 freshly prepared reindeer hides. From the local museum we borrowed a centuries old sealskin lamp for our interior scenes, as well as an ancient bow quiver and a hunting sling. Our traditional ulu, a crescent-shaped Inuit knife, was fashioned from a reindeer antler and a scrap of local iron.
Necessary transportation in rugged territory
Our cast of Thule was entirely drawn from the modern Inuit community of Novoe Chaplino. Our main male character was also our crew driver, and more than once he hopped out of the baidara in full costume to drive his World War II-era five-ton over the pass that linked our two key filming locations. The Thule boy landed up on screen because he was impossible to keep out of shot anyway, but in costume he was an entirely convincing junior Thule explorer. The men in the baidara spend their working days hunting for whales, seals and walrus on the Bering Strait in more modern boats, and the Thule grandmother is a well-known Inuit storyteller and a master seamstress. Out on the tundra with the reindeer herds, we were able to let our cameras run without interfering; the herders worked in reindeer-skin clothing and boots, and even their lasso was made from walrus skin and reindeer antler. Apart from removing the odd wristwatch, our Thule scenes came alive with very little direction. The last line of the film - "the world of the Thule is alive in the Inuit" - is literally true.
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