Isuma: To Have an Idea features a survey of film and video produced by Igloolik Isuma Productions—Canada’s first Inuit independent production company founded in 1990 by Zacharias Kunuk, Paul Apak Angilirq, Pauloosie Qulitalik, and Norman Cohn.

 The films produced by Isuma are a hybrid of improvisation, drama and documentary, as well as experimental video art and mainstream film. Having forged a unique Inuit style of community-based media productions, Isuma’s films reconstruct and narrate—through recollection, storytelling and reflection on contemporary experience—life in Canada’s north from and Inuit point of view. Contributing directly to job creation and thereby to the development of the economy of Igloolik (pop. 1,200), Isuma’s works telescope viewers into deep folds of Inuit life. The films document, sometimes retroactively, the elements of nomadic culture and the increasing influences of sedentary Occidental cultures to the east and south. Centrally concerned with survival, the documentary and dramatic narrations offer rich self-reflections of Inuit social life and customs, whether through the politics of community or on the effects of the South. As Zacharias Kunuk put it in the context of Isuma’s latest film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, his work tries to answer two questions that have haunted him his whole life: “Who are we?” and “What happened to us?”