1. Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) (2002)
If we go to movies to take us somewhere we’ve never been before, this was one from a place movies have never been before. With his feature debut, Zacharias Kunuk gave us the world’s first Inuit feature, an epic of Shakespearean breadth framed by an Arctic landscape tailor-made for the wide screen. Fusing dramatic and documentary techniques, Kunuk wove his story from legends related by elders, and drew on professionals and non-actors to bring an ancient legend vividly to life. Both a gripping action movie and a sublime meditation, Atanarjuat unfolds with a sense of real time and boundless space.