The Other World; Or, Glimpses of the Supernatural by Frederick George Lee

Upon returning to the town after thirteen years, McLain observed that very little had changed. He and Paterniti travelled around the country for a month and stayed in Qaanaaq for a week to film. In June, 2019, McLain returned to Greenland. “They were taking a bet on how soon I would die,” McLain said. A group of narwhal hunters, dressed in traditional winter clothes-polar-bear-fur pants and sealskin boots-laughed when they saw him. Everest (“picture the Michelin Man but, instead of filled with tires and air, you’re filled with down”), was inadequate for the Arctic cold. He showed up in a custom padded jacket that, although designed for Mt. McLain first visited Qaanaaq in 2006, on a photography assignment for National Geographic.

When they return from a hunt, they often post on Facebook to announce that there is fresh whale meat and skin in town. There are less than a hundred people who continue this tradition, and they are both in competition and collaboration with one another. When the ice melts, the hunters focus on narwhal, using kayaks and harpoons that they build themselves. The hunters are pulled on handmade sleds by dogs that are only partly domesticated-there are cases annually of people being attacked by hunting dogs. In winter, the Inuit hunt seal and walrus that approach breathing holes in the ice, which, already mercurial, gets thinner every year. “Greenlanders believe in communion, with each other and nature,” Michael Paterniti, the writer and narrator of the film, says.

And the work that they do, which quite literally is feeding the young and old, is always in the service of community.” One scene shows the town celebrating Greenland’s National Day outside, where women stand behind foldable tables and pass out slices of whale on paper plates, much like a Sunday lunch at church. “But, at the same time, they’re deeply part of the collective. The hunters in Qaanaaq, most of whom are men, are “some of the most rugged, independent human beings left on earth,” the director, David McLain, told me.

The film “The Other World” peers into this tradition of whale hunting, the heart of which is the sharing of the catch. In the spring, when the ice thaws, some of the community’s Inuit members begin to hunt narwhal, small whales with large, sharply pointed tusks which live only in the Arctic. The town is so remote that its six hundred or so residents remain virtually isolated from the rest of the country year-round. Qaanaaq, one of the northernmost villages in Greenland, has winters where the sun does not appear for more than three months.

The Other World; Or, Glimpses of the Supernatural by Frederick George Lee