Documentary - Vanishing Point (Inuit Culture)

Via documentalka, this is an excellent documentary about the efforts of two Inuit communities to maintain connections to their traditional culture. Official site for the film is here - this is their synopsis:

Navarana is a Polar Eskimo elder who lives in the most remote corner of the planet, the northwest tip of Greenland. She is connected by blood to a group of Canadian Inuit because of a shaman’s migration journey across the frozen Arctic in the 1860s. Today, despite rapid technological and social changes, her people in Greenland proudly maintain and covet age-old customs. But Navarana wonders what life is like for her distant cousins in Arctic Canada. Setting out on hunting journeys in both her homeland and on Canada’s Baffin Island, she discovers that while these two isolated groups of Inuit share much in common, they also present strikingly different lifestyles and practices. At a time when her people are up against vast and inescapable challenges, Navarana looks for the way forward and considers what has been lost and what has been gained. 

Vanishing Point is a POV documentary filmed in an observational, cinema vérité style. Its spoken languages are dialects of Inuktitut. 

Release Date: May, 2012

Enjoy!

Vanishing Point

Published on Nov 30, 2013



This feature documentary tells the story of 2 Inuit communities of the circumpolar north one on Canada Baffin Island, the other in Northwest Greenland that are linked by a migration led by an intrepid shaman. Navarana, an Inughuit elder and descendant of the shaman, draws inspiration and hope from the ties that still bind the 2 communities to face the consequences of rapid social and environmental change.

Meet The Izzards (Eddie Izzard Traces His Genetic Heritage)

This is cool on a science level, but even more so on an "Eddie Izzard is awesome" level. Two parts - one looks at the maternal line and the second looks at the paternal line. Enjoy Meet the Izzards!

Meet The Izzards Episode 1: The Mum's Line

BBC One | Comedian and actor Eddie Izzard embarks on a unique, epic and personal journey using his own DNA to trace the migration of his ancestors out of Africa and into Europe over almost 200,000 years. A simple saliva swab and the latest cutting-edge DNA science help Eddie explore the secrets of his genetic history. In this first film Eddie explores his mum's line over the last 10,000 generations, tracing her ancestral route across 10,000 miles all the way back home to Britain.

Along the way he meets some of his modern DNA cousins, from the African bush to the shores of the Red Sea, as he discovers how humans populated the globe, why he has blue eyes and how the Izzards ended up in Europe.

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Meet The Izzards Episode 2: The Dad's Line

BBC One | In the second episode of a two-part documentary, comedian and actor Eddie Izzard embarks on a unique, epic and personal journey using his own DNA to trace the migration of his ancestors out of Africa and into Europe. A simple saliva swab and the latest cutting-edge DNA science help Eddie explore the secrets of his father's family history. He traces his male ancestral route over hundreds of thousands of years and across 10,000 miles all the way back home to Britain.

Along the way he meets some of his DNA cousins among the Bakola pygmies of Cameroon, and in the Middle East he discovers how we first had sex with Neanderthals, as he finds out where the male Izzards came from.