Produced and directed by Lisa Stevenson and Eduardo Kohn (McGill University, Montréal).

Into Unknown Parts visually and sonically captures the Inuit experience of being forced to leave their home communities and live for an undetermined period of time in a southern sanatorium. Without minimizing the humanitarian crisis the TB epidemic posed for the Canadian State, this film explores the experience of rupture and dislocation caused by these policies.  Rather than a straightforward expository narrative, it seeks to capture one of the most striking aspects of this dislocation: the way the possibility of communication, verbal and non-verbal, was actually put into question. Inuit often found that words escaped them when they tried to write or send spoken messages across the miles that now separated them from their families.  The words they did send to each other were often met by silence: letters and tapes lost in transit, the recipient dying before the letters arrived. In some cases the silence persists today. In the case of those who never returned, family members still hold out hope that they will someday hear news of their whereabouts. 

Location: Critical Media Lab, Peterson Hall, Room 108.