UNFINISHED JOURNEYS

Unfinished Journeys 2012 (43 min)

In Vladimir Tomic’s film Unfinished Journeys we follow Niels, who is half Danish and half Greenlandic man. The focal point is the story of Niels’s relation to his Greenlandic roots. It is a tale in which poetical imagery and magnificent Greenlandic scenery meet a socio-political perspective with documentary shots of everyday life in Greenland. The question of how a cultural identity like Inuit has been influenced after having had the norms of Danish society imposed on it for years, is central in Tomic’s film. Is it possible to maintain a Greenlandic self understanding even though an external system is threatening to wipe it out? In the film we meet artist Julie Edel Hardenberg and author Helene Thisen as well, who like Niels live with a split cultural identity. The issue unfolds in the documentary shots, but also in the film’s poetic pictures where ice, water, vapour and clouds explore a transformation theme, producing a mystic and harsh atmosphere in which Tomic brings us closer to the post colonial trauma. In Unfinished Journeys Tomic seeks to create an understanding of the consequences of the colonisation of Greenland for the Intuits’ identity as individuals and parts of a society.