Village at the End of the World (2012) Reviews

• Global Spillage

  tieman642014-04-24

  Directed by Sarah Gavron, and set in a tiny village nestled upon the North Western coast of Greenland, "Village at the End of the World" watches as beleaguered locals attempt to cope with the closing of a halibut factory owned by the Royal Greenland fisheries company. When the factory shuts down, livelihoods are terminated with it. Overlong and slight, "Village" is preoccupied with the effects of modernity and globalisation. The village's tiny Inuit population relies on the employment generated by outside mega-corporations, on the arrival of massive freighters for supplies, and local kids spend much of their time logging into Facebook, wearing Liverpool FC jerseys, playing with Google Earth, cyber-dating and listening to foreign hip-hop acts. Toward the second half of the film, Gavron captures the way in which technology simultaneously alienates and connects, simultaneously shrinks and expands worlds. More depressingly, technology induces lamentations based on fantasies and promises it cannot fully provide. Through media and machines, Inuits are granted a window to another possible world, but never the means to actually touch and taste that which lies beyond their village. Ignorance, for many, is bliss. Unsurprisingly, local kids find themselves dwelling on suicide, or mourning their inability to extricate themselves from their tiny village. Elsewhere Greenlandic communities are disintegrating, the local Inuit population under siege; huskies outnumber humans 10 to 1 and the local school has only eight kids. "The way of the Inuit is to struggle with nature and to live sustainably from its fruits," one fisherman says. Their existence is a constant battle, but one can't help but be enamoured by the beautiful landscapes amidst which they toil. Surrounded by vast oceans, limitless skies and rolling hills peppered with multicoloured houses perched upon concrete and stilts, this little Greenlandic village is never anything less than breathtaking. 7.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Chasing Ice" and "A Year in the Taiga".

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