The Last Days of Okak: filming Inuit loss in Northern Labrador

The Last Days of Okak, a short film released in 1985, tells the story of the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic's devastating impact on a Labrador Inuit community founded by Moravian missionaries. With an extremely high death rate, Okak was abandoned soon after the epidemic. This article explores the film as both public education and commemoration, and discerns the film's political meaning, set as it is in an ongoing colonial context: that of the Inuit in what is now Canada. The filmmakers use narrative and visual techniques that effectively commemorate the large number of deceased and the survivors, a few of whom appear on screen. The film represents a departure from approaches often seen in Arctic films in that it de-romanticises the Inuit. It is also political in that it quietly and continually links the interrupted Inuit past and the emotional geographies of the Inuit present.