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Tell us about your work.
Filming Folklore: Exploring Inuvialuit mysteries through the lens An interview with filmmaker Jerri Thrasher
First and foremost, I am an Inuvialuk in film. Aside from television producing, I am also a producer, writer and director. I write films that are a mix of traditional and contemporary elements about Inuit folklore, oftentimes pressing on social issues. Although written in a fictional sense, there are themes that are true to our history.
What about folklore interests you? When I was a child, my mother read to me on a regular basis. Fortunately enough, there was one author who created Inuit children content, Michael Kusugak. His stories were so similar (if not identical) to the stories we were told from our parent(s) and I remember feeling proud that we were represented in these stories. Those were times your imagination ran wild and – as you may know – Inuit folklore is often terrifying. Those stories served a purpose: to deter children from venturing too far into dangerous territory – a survival mechanism. So, to my surprise, when I got older, I found that there wasn’t very much Inuit-based content in all forms of media. This was frustrating as we had scarier and more exciting stories than any Hollywood movie I could think of. There was this feeling of purpose and obligation to step up and be one of the content creators in the best way I knew how – through film.
The three international films that formed the anthology, The Last Walk. On the top is a still from the Alaskan version (dir. Anna Hoover); in the middle, the Northwest Territories version (dir. Jerri Thrasher); and on the bottom, the Greenland version (dir. Pipaluk Jørgensen and Johannes Lynge). Photo Courtesy of ImagiNATIVE Film Festival/Jason Ryle
