At the Winter Sea Ice Camp: Part 1, Quentin Brown, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

At the Winter Sea Ice Camp. This film, another in the “Man: A Course of Study” Netsilik Eskimo series, is quite a bit longer and more intense than At the Autumn River Camp. Again, it’s beautifully photographed and very realistic, and it seems like not a detail of the Netsilik’s traditional ways is left out, even those that are kind of hard to watch, such as scenes of butchering seals, people enthusiastically chowing down on raw seal organs, and the little baby boy frolicking in the nude (you can tell it’s a boy by…well, you just can.) One wonders of the appropriateness of some of these scenes for 5th graders, the audience this was supposedly made for. Still, there are many amazing things to watch here, such as the Eskimos building a huge, multi-roomed igloo out of nothing but snow blocks, and installing an ice window in it, the unusual way seals are hunted (it’s a variation on ice fishing), children tumbling in the snow during blizzard conditions, demonstrations of many different indoor and outdoor games, men playing a huge, really cool-looking sealskin drum, and seal hunters riding their dogsleds into a wilderness of white. It’s also a lot colder in this film than in the other one—everybody’s breath is constantly visible and the men’s facial hair is caked in ice most of the time. A great documentation of a native people’s traditional ways of life. Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: N/A. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: *****+. Overall Rating: ****.