About Sanajiit (Inuit Makers)
On Sanajiit Video Making Style and Slow TV
Completed in 2025, the first season of Sanajiit/Inuit Makers, is a 13-episode documentary series (of more than 90 hours) filmed in the Nunavut communities of Igloolik and Arviat, and two episodes in Montreal. The series portrayed 12 Inuit women, men, elders and young talented Inuit ‘making’ – their craft, profession or skill in their community.
Sanajiit/Inuit Makers was filmed in a “Slow TV” style inviting viewers into an immersive experience. By maintaining chronological continuity, we respected the integrity of time as it unfolded for Inuit life and work. The camera was a participative and engaged observer, capturing both the mundane and the extraordinary with equal significance, allowing the audience to interpret the content themselves.
This is how Inuit make things. We the viewer sit and pass time with them.
There is no better way to depict Inuit life than with this empathic experience of Isuma Slow TV.
The original idea for the Sanajiit series was 13 episodes, each with five one-hour parts. But everything changed after we filmed our first episode, featuring an Inuit carver. Watching the carving process unfold, we realized that a Slow TV approach – showing his art in real time with minimal editing – felt much more true to the experience. This way, viewers don’t just see the work; they feel it, immersing themselves in the world of the Makers without the usual interruptions of traditional editing.
Sanajiit is a Slow TV television series inviting viewers into an immersive experience – whether by watching an Inuit carver’s intricate process over days, or being part of a fishing expedition. By maintaining chronological continuity, we respect the integrity of time as it unfolds for Inuit life and work. The camera is an engaged observer, capturing both the mundane and the extraordinary with equal significance, allowing the audience to interpret themselves
Sanajiit is inspired by three artistic movements: First, the video art making of Norman Cohn, experimenting since 1970, with his video making and video portraits. Secondly, the inspiration of video made by Zacharias Kunuk (Inuit filmmaker and co-founder of Igloolik Isuma Productions and Kingulliit Productions), and Norman Cohn (co-founder of Igloolik Isuma Productions and Kingulliiit Productions). They have been experimenting together since 1990 in mixing Inuit culture and knowledge with this style of video making through many documentaries, short films and feature films produced over 30 years. And finally, inspiration from the Slow TV movement, which began in Norway with Thomas Hellum's 2009 broadcast of a seven-hour train journey, emphasizing simplicity, and real-time observation. This offers a meditative, immersive experience for viewers to engage deeply with the content – giving a cross-cultural understanding and appreciation for life in different cultures.
Carol Kunnuk has been working in collaboration with Zacharias Kunuk in Igloolik since the late 1990’s, producing and filming. She later trained Mark Jr. Malliki in filming with an engaged and observational camera. Gabriela Gamez has been working in collaboration with Norman Cohn since 2006, producing several artistic projects, among them the innovative isuma.tv. Gillian Robinson has been working with Norman Cohn since the early 1980’s on different creative projects.
It's impressive what can be created with Isuma video style and Slow TV put together with Inuit knowledge and the arctic's reality. This changed everything for me by making me understand Inuit sense of humour, the way Inuktitut is built as a language, the relationship and codes between generations, I understand how things are made... it feels more approachable, the process of things coming to existence is less mystified... I relax while I watch and I feel in connection with people, in their space and time... and when they say things that would have not have been kept in normal TV it makes things feel more real, less staged.
Everything is allowed. Time feels like a privilege.
These four creators of Sanajiit chose this way of video making and a slow TV approach, for its ability to authentically convey Inuit life, art, humor, language, and relationships. Finding that Slow TV democratizes storytelling, allowing viewers to decide what matters to them while preserving the integrity of time, space and process. This immersive style aligns with the Inuit way of life and offers audiences a profound connection to the Makers’ world. In a fast-paced world where every moment is a race against time, this counter-cultural movement known as ‘Slow TV’ is a new genre, captivating audiences by offering a departure from the rapid-fire pace of modern life and media. Slow TV, with its lengthy, unedited broadcasts of various activities, journeys, or events, serves as a form of meditative entertainment challenging our conventional notions of television.
On Isuma Slow TV
Conversation between Norman Cohn and Gabriela Gamez, May 09, 2017
(Edited by Gabriela Gamez)
In 1970, as an Executive Director for the experimental education TV project he was working on, Norman Cohn was invited to an early childhood education conference where media was the subject. The other people attending this conference were Mr. Rogers, Captain Kangaroo and the woman who ran the Sesame Street organization. This conference then led to another invitation to participate in the ‘White House Conference on Early Childhood’, where Norman Cohn came as part of the Media Committee.
At this conference, Norman Cohn was part of a group working on, ‘The Emergence of Identity in the First Five Years’. He was 24 years old and by no means an expert in education, which meant he was mostly listening to the others talk when suddenly someone said, ‘Maybe we should make a film about this subject.’ Norman thought, ‘That I can certainly talk about!’ He had been experimenting with film and had gathered some experience by that time. He knew filmmaking was very expensive – about a $1,000 dollars per minute – and they didn’t have that kind of budget. When Norman was telling me this story he recounted with surprise…
Norman
Well maybe we can make a video. Video is cheaper than film.’ This was 1970, and this Japanese porta pack had just been invented in 1968. I don’t remember even knowing anything about it. It was like Zach when he went south in 1981 to buy a Betamax camera, when there wasn’t even television in Igloolik, but he had seen an advertisement in a magazine. So he went south to buy something that he had seen advertised in a magazine. So I said, ‘maybe we can make a video, it’s cheaper.’ And somebody said, ‘Well, who would do that?’ and I said, ‘Well, I will do it.’ So, basically I volunteered to make a video about early childhood development for $3,000 dollars to this committee. And everybody said, ‘Great, go ahead!’
I actually looked it up in the Yellow Pages, and found a company called Concorde Video Systems, listed with a Chicago office in the Yellow Pages that said something like ‘TV and Video equipment’. And I called and said, ‘Look…I’m working for the White House. The White House conference on children. And, we are trying to do a video project and I wonder if you guys could lend me some video equipment?’ And they agreed. So they loaned me what was essentially the very first generation of porta pack, where it was a camera and a recorder. But the portable recorder didn’t even have a rewind, you would put it to record and it would record a 30-minute tape, when the tape ran out, the only way you could rewind it is either thread it backwards and then crank it back to the beginning by hand. Or, you take the reel of this portable machine and you had to put it on a bigger machine, and then the bigger machine could rewind it. So it was like very first generation video. I guess I had a bigger one to be able to view it on. And I took it all home, to my apartment and unpacked and read the manual. Which is exactly Zach’s story. You know, he got his Betamax and unpacked it and read the manual, plugged everything in. And then he said, ‘for the first 6 months everything came out black and white,’ and he couldn’t figure out why it was black and white, until one day he noticed on the manual that there was a switch. And you turned the switch and then you got color.
After Norman figured out the porta pack, he started following his 4-year-old son Jason, recording him until the tape ran out at exactly 30 minutes. Norman just followed Jason for 30 straight minutes without looking anywhere else. It was the first time Norman was the camera man, as at his work with the experimental television project, Gordon was the camera man doing a more regular kind of filming. Norman said to me on remembering that moment when he was 24 years old, recording his four-year-old son, that with this first working with video, the whole concept of mediation changed for him.
Norman
I picked up this video camera for the first time, I threaded a 30-minute reel on it. I know that I have this one 30-minute reel, and I know that I can practice with it. I can use it, then I can rewind it, then I can use it again, I can rewind it again, I can use it again. It cost $13 dollars and that $13 dollars I could use 20 times and it wouldn’t cost one more cent. So the first thing I did was just shoot something for 30 minutes. Just looking through the camera for 30 minutes.
And by looking through…shooting this thing, by accident, for 30 straight minutes. And, by accident, aiming it on a single human subject that happened to be a 4-year-old child – who is a quite an interesting human subject if you start staring at a child for half an hour straight. Then discovering that the quality of that video was with that real time experience. And it looking so real compared to film…first of all because I could see it right away. I could see it right away and there it was again, and it was like reliving the experience I had just had 30 minutes ago. And thinking to myself, ‘You know watching it doesn’t feel any different from living it. Why is it so real?’ Compared to all the films we were making which never seemed real. They always seemed like something else. Whereas this was a video of Jason being himself really.
Whereas in film it was always, this is about children, this is about teaching, this is about kids, this is about this game, this is about something. So for me the whole concept of mediation seemed to be overturned. Again, kind of by accident. Because I didn’t shoot on and off, on and off, making a lot of breaks and cuts and choices. I let it run for an unmediated 30 minutes. I didn’t aim it all over the place, I didn’t first shoot Jason and then put the camera on his mother when his mother talked to him, or put the camera on his sister when his sister made noise, or looked out the window. I wasn’t doing any of the conventional things you would do in filmmaking to get you know, this sort of simulated 360-degree view of something. For some reason I just decided I would just follow this one thing around for the whole time. So I had an unmediated view of a person for an unmediated 30 minutes. And what the immediate playback gave me was that it looked like – an unmediated view of his experience of reality – that was so astonishing to watch. That I said to myself, ‘this is like…you know…something I never saw before’.
Gabriela
It was as if the experience itself – by recording it in video – had enlarged? Or taken up more space?
Norman
It was as if the experience of the human being I was watching, who was my own child – but that was through the camera, very much someone who was not me, someone who was experiencing that 30 minutes, exactly the same 30 minutes as I was experiencing it – that, through the video, I had the ability in a way to relive the same 30 minutes I had lived, as if I were in another human being. So it gave me a kind of pure empathetic experience that had to do with some mysterious quality of unmediated time.
Picture if I’ve been watching you listening to me. You never see me [Norman], you never even look at the computer, you are just watching you [Gabriela] for the last 30 minutes. And then I played it back for you. And you would have a weird kind of déjà vu life experience. It would be as if somebody had rewound your last 30 minutes, because I could literally rewind it. It would take 2 minutes to rewind it, and then replay it. And so with a 2-minute lag, you could rewind and re-experience the 30 minutes you had just lived through, inside your body, from outside your body – through the frame that I had put around it. And have a unique, otherwise impossible, experience of time and reflection that seemed to be enabled somehow by this particular technology.
That for someone, who had just been producing a film series about children, I knew instantly that whatever was happening with this video camera, it was not like film at all. Also, I mean…my initial reaction was that it had nothing to do with me. That simply by artificially keeping Jason in the frame I felt I was just part of the equipment. But I subsequently came to understand – as I began to do more and more and more of these things, that I eventually called ‘Portraits’ – was that it wasn’t just putting a frame around someone, but that that person, or other people, would see not only the person that the frame was around for an unmediated period of time – which could be 5 minutes or 30 minutes or it could be 5 hours – but that there was something about the way I was seeing the person. Something between him or her and me, that was part of the dynamic. That you could do it better or you could do it worse. You could do it so that people were very uncomfortable. Or you could do it so that people would be very comfortable.
So the other ‘unmediated quality’, besides ‘unmediated time’, and ‘unmediated editing’, or ‘frame,’ ‘subject’, and ‘unmediated technology’, was ‘unmediated judgment’. As if you were not so much being observed, you were being witnessed. And the witnesses’ job is just to witness. The witness is not to judge, analyze, summarize, or even psychoanalyze. The witness is a human being but, at the same time, not more or less judgmental than the camera itself. A human being without judgment. And that means, whatever is the human emotional version of being ‘unmediated.’