Beginning with its world premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival, where it captured the Camera d'Or for best first feature, Zacharias Kunuk's sweeping Inuit saga has become something of a phenomenon. Atanarjuat has elicited ecstatic reviews and won awards at most of the festivals it has participated in. Notable for its many firsts (first feature made in the Inuktitut language, first feature to come out of Nunavut), Atanarjuat is also the first Canadian feature in quite a while to succeed on almost every level.

Set sometime in the distant past (like all myths, the film feels timeless), Atanarjuat begins as a fascinating exercise in cultural anthropology. Director Kunuk revels in the rituals of daily life-the icing of the runners on the Inuit sleds, the maintenance of blubber-fire lamps, the singing and storytelling-and doesn't feel compelled to try and explain everything. He just shows us, and anything that seems inexplicable ends up contributing to the film's mysterious beauty.

The story is simplicity itself. Atanarjuat falls in love with Atuat, who returns his love. But Atuat is promised to Oki, a particularly nasty, brutish and short member of their small nomadic community. When Atanarjuat eventually wins her, a feud is set in motion that leads to murder and revenge.

Mythic, elemental, intense, archetypal, sexually robust-Atanarjuat is all of these things and it also fulfills one of this critic's fundamental wishes for the art of film: to provide entry into, and some hint of understanding of, an unknown world. Kunuk and his crew do so in a mesmerizing way. When Oki and his men attack Atanarjuat and his brother, Atanarjuat is forced to flee naked across the ice. The sight of a helpless man, shorn of everything including his clothes, running for his life and framed against the immense flatness of the north-where the horizon seems to be an infinity away and for which the phrase "terrible beauty" seems to have been coined-is both dreamlike and breathtaking at the same time.

At almost three hours in length, Atanarjuat does contain a few LONGEURS as well as the occasional scene that could have been cut without any damage to the narrative flow, but overall the film's length works in its favour. Think of it as the "total immersion" method of filmmaking-after three hours caught up in Kunuk's vision of Inuit legend, it's hard to leave the theatre and NOT see the world a little bit differently. How often does that happen?

That the film was shot on digital video does not hinder the beauty of the exterior scenes, even if it does render some of the "interiors" (in snow houses - is igloo politically incorrect?) a bit murky and grainy. Kunuk's camera captures the seemingly infinite shades of blue to be found in the far north while treating the fierce whiteness of the place-it is the white that can kill-with the awesome power and respect it deserves. I take my hat off to Kunuk and every member of his talented team.