Storytelling is often a way of re-engaging a culture with its past. Zacharias Kunuk, an Inuit videomaker from the Northwest Territories, has embarked on an ambitious tetralogy that beautifully re-enacts past seasonal rituals from Inuit culture while revivifying them in the present. Saputi, the third in the series, tracks the fictive story of three families building a weir to catch arctic char going upriver to their spawning lakes. Like the earlier Qaggiq and Nunaqpa (PFA, '89, '91), this work exquisitely registers the stark tundral plains and its ancestral cache. And like its predecessors, Saputi is a bounty of documentary-like details with its seal-skin tents, caribou parkas, carved fishing spears, and yelping huskies. Enacting this engrossing fishing expedition, using "actors" from his hometown of Igloolik, Kunuk tacitly renews the Inuit peoples' connection to their culture. When the char arrive at the weir, they are not as bountiful as in previous years. But their return reaffirms the past as a source of sustenance.-Steve Seid