Port Moody’s temperate marine climate is a long way from Kugluktuk, Nunavut, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
But for PoMo filmmaker Eva Wunderman — who spent part of a winter in the northern community for her latest film, Edna’s Bloodline — the quest for family ties is a common human trait found wherever people live and form a community.
“The desire to see where your parents and grandparents were born compared to where you live today — a lot of people come from Europe or Asia — I think we can all relate a little bit how to how different our lives are compared to what they could have been.”
In Wunderman’s evocative and engaging flick, a family in Kugluktuk renews ties with the relatives of their Swedish forbears and share culture and family stories, some of them heartbreaking and others bittersweet.
It starts with an email connection and a Skype interview by members of the Norberg family in Canada, led by Edna Elias, who was a commissioner for Nunavut until 2015, and her relatives in Sweden, Frederick and his father Eric Norberg, as the three seek to know more about their adventurous great-grandfather, Petter Norberg.
Using information gathered by writer Lennart Von Post, newspaper articles, Hudson’s Bay archives and the Canadian Norberg family’s oral history, the families trace the footsteps of Petter who was a trapper, Hudson’s Bay post manager and explorer who left Sweden in the late 1800s for a better life.
He was also among the first to sail the Inside Passage and he was the first to find the remains of the Franklin Expedition; however, it was his love for his Inuit bride, Dora, that led him to start a family in the Canadian north, the descendants of which form a substantial number of the more than 1,000 people who live in Kugluktuk.
The trip to Kugluktuk, Nunavut, and Härnösand, Sweden, provided a fruitful journey for Wunderman.
She wrote the documentary and filmed it with her crew, with actors recreating some of the historical vignettes that are mixed with the live action scenes of Norberg family members making connections on both sides of the Atlantic.
The one-long documentary was made with funding support from Swedish television, which has already aired it to 600,00 viewers.
“All these little stories are revealed in the documentary. You get little moments of Petter’s life while you are in the moment with Edna and Frederick. They go on a seal hunt. They do a few things to see how it was in those days.”
• Wunderman will be at the Port Moody Film Society screening, on Friday, Sept. 14 at 7:30 p.m. in the Inlet Theatre (100 Newport Dr.) to answer questions afterwards. Tickets are $5 for society members and $7 for non-members (plus a $5 for an annual society membership). Visit pmfilm.ca.
