Village at the End of the World promo
Tuesday was like summer, so off to the Soho Screening Rooms in London to see a preview of the Village at the End of the World on what was an almost-balmy evening (snow forecast for next week of course).
The Village at the End of the World is a 76minute feature film/doco about a small, 50-person strong village in remote Greenland. Howling dogs, mid-winter darkness and toothless grannies feature heavily.
It's lovely. At first I thought it was going to be depressing – village on brink on global warming extinction type of thing – but it is in fact charming, heartwarming and real.
There are a few stars of the show: the village shit-collector (literally, and in all weathers, he collects it in barrels and wheels it off to a beach out the back where it is poured into the sea or onto the frozen waves); the 76 year old granny who remembers when electricity first came to the village in 1988 – "Before that we burnt whale blubber in sandstone cups"; and a 15-year-old boy who lives with his grandparents and wears groovy sunglasses and listens to his iPod as the seals are dragged in.
We follow these lives and others over more than a year as the village chief struggles to gain control of the fish factory. Closed by the company it has put the village on the brink of disaster. Every time a family leaves, climbing into a big red helicopter and flying off to the nearest town, the schoolmaster sheds another tear. His school only has eight pupils left and counting.
In summer tourists come through. This is the funniest part, as villagers gather to sell trinkets, dressed in their Inuit Sunday best. It really is a case of 'humour the tourists' as they blunder about, although with the best of intentions. It made me think of every cringe-worthy tourist/eco/ethical excursion I have ever been on. Now I know for sure that they were laughing at us!
So there is hope, and there is future. And there is the modern world just out there. Our 15-year-old hero, Lars, has 200 Facebook friends who he has never met and flies around New York in 3D in Google Earth. The collision of old world with high-speed broadband is repeated here just as it is everywhere, presenting opportunity and excitement as well as temptation and exposure.
The whole film is in Greenlandic with subtitles. I left feeling uplifted in a gently nice way. We'd seen polar bears shot and narwhales slaughtered, their meat and blubber distributed to villagers freely, but nothing was wasted and everything was for a point – survival at the edge of the world. But we'd also seen real people, real lives, real fun, real hope, real achievements.
If you see it online – it felt like one of those feature-length YouTube movies you might bump into by mistake – or can catch it at an art house cinema then I'd recommend it.
IMBD: Village at the End of the World
Made in Copenhagen
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