Kerrigan Almey

I watch a lot of great TV on the APTN channel. Just thoroughly enjoyed the film 'Uvanga', "the story of a 13-year-old boy [Thomas] looking for himself in the unfamiliar world that gave him life" Absorbing, enthralling, informative, sobering, sometimes highly amusing, with heart-stopping vistas of the region's dazzling high-summer sky, sun, cloud, crepuscular rays, water, and shoreline. Filmed in Canada's remote community of Igloolik (located north of the Arctic Circle, between the Canadian mainland and Baffin Island, Igloolik is situated on a small island in Foxe Basin just off the northeast corner of Melville Peninsula), in one poignant scene, visiting half-Inuit Thomas and his Inuit half-brother Travis have trekked out to the beach where their father Caleb drowned saving Caleb's cousin Barrie from a similar fate, and the boys come upon a rag-tag rock inuksuk erected by Barrie to commemorate Caleb and keep his ghost company. As he adds a small Precambrian ordovician stone to the guardian, Travis tells Thomas that he can, too, and Thomas dutifully tops it with a large lichen-covered piece, then asks Travis how long the inukshuk might stand. With wisdom well beyond his years, Travis replies ~ "For longer than we will be here. Maybe forever." And if that doesn't tug at the heart-strings, in another segment of the film, Thomas' white mom Anna, who's readying to return to Montreal to have a cancerous tumour removed from a breast, the scene provided a great kick in the funny-bone after Anna drops in on two enterprising Inuit lady-friends busying themselves folding boxes for their new pizza shop's grand opening that evening, one indicating that her partner will be looking after the deliveries. The ladies are wearing their shop's new logo t-shirts, and Anna asks them to show them off to her. As they proudly stretch the tees across their breasts, Anna asks if she can buy one of the tops. Her request refused, they tell her they'll gladly give her one. "It'll be great advertising for us in Montreal," they chuckle. And they add, "Tell them we deliver!" ^/^