exploits the artifice Flaherty attempted to hide as contemporary Inuits reenact life as it was for their forebears in the 1930s. The loose plot is built around a wedding proposal-a hapless boy trying to make himself worthy of an even more hapless young girl and her family-in an arranged marriage. But the actors have improvised dialog and action and the result is both entertaining and startlingly realistic. Setting (a vast expanse of permanent snow and the igloo, its ice walls filtering the sunlight in blue); costumes of caribou-skin; and rituals (from the construction of a qaggiq or ceremonial igloo to "survival" games and drum-dances) are all authentic and make Qaggiq appear, to the uninitiated, to be a documentary. (The actors' earnestness, even occasionally punctuated by sheer delight in their endeavor, convinces entirely.) But this is where it catches us with our stereotypes up; in the town of Igloolik, where videomaker Zacharias Kunuk works with the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation as well as on his own projects, the igloo, the rituals, the dogsleds forging trails, and the arranged marriages among nomadic families are all fast becoming an ancestral memory. And so Kunuk becomes the Tony Buba of the Northwest Territories while his concerns in making the videotape remain integral to his Inuit upbringing: "For the Inuit," he says, "past, present and future are all connected in our land. The land does not change...We call up time, an older reality, and bring it into our time, in the present, using video as a way to bring the two together."