The village at the end of the world, struggling for its survival
Sarah Gavron
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With a dwindling population and the modern world encroaching, Niaqornat, one of Greenland’s most remote settlements, was on the verge of extinction when Sarah Gavron first ventured there. Yet the film-maker found a village prepared to fight for its survival.
The idea for Village at the End of the World came about in 2009. My husband David and I had just had our second child and I was waiting for scripts for a couple of fiction films I was developing. He's a cinematographer and he had this idea of us all going to Greenland to visit some of the old hunting communities there, with only a vague thought that there might be a film in it – so we set off on this adventure that turned out to be our first research trip.
I hadn't been to Greenland before, though David had – he grew up in Copenhagen and from early childhood, he wanted to be an explorer; he'd actually crossed the inland ice on an expedition and done an Arctic Marathon. For me, though, it was quite a challenge suddenly to be plunged into this place where nature rules.
We visited a few hamlets before we ended up in Niaqornat, an Inuit village on the Nuussuaq peninsula, in the west of the country. It is one of Greenland's northernmost and smallest settlements: dogs outnumber people. There were probably 15 houses in total: brightly coloured, Danish flat-pack buildings which they'd had since the 1950s. Nobody owns land in Greenland, so none had gardens, though nothing grows there anyway: it has this surreal, lunar landscape.
The sea is the only natural resource in terms of food, while the village shop sold whatever it got from the supply ship, which came every few weeks between May and December. There are no roads, so you can only get in and out by helicopter or boat (for some of the year); if the weather's bad, you can be stuck for several weeks.
We initially spent three weeks there; at that point we thought we'd go back to London, talk to some producers and try to raise some money to return. We felt there had been a lot of nature documentaries about that part of the world, but not a lot about the people living there. And Niaqornat particularly seemed to offer a heightened version of
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