Zacharias Kunuk

Zacharias Kunuk, OC (born November 27, 1957) is a Canadian Inuk producer and director most notable for his film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the first Canadian dramatic feature film produced entirely in Inuktitut. He is the president and co-founder with Paul Qulitalik, Paul Apak Angilirq, and the only non-Inuit, ex-New Yorker team member, Norman Cohn, of Igloolik Isuma Productions, Canada's first independent Inuit production company.

Zacharias Kunuk was born in Kapuivik on Baffin Island in Canada. In 1966 he attended school in Igloolik. There he carved and sold soapstone sculptures to afford movie admissions. As his skill improved, he was able to buy cameras and photographed Inuit hunting scenes. When he heard about video cameras in 1981, he purchased a camera and the basic equipment to be able to teach himself how to create his own movies.

His second film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, is a co-production with Denmark in which he is a co-writer and co-director with Norman Cohn. It premiered on September 7, 2006, as the opening film at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In 2002, Kunuk was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

He is the son of Enoki Kunuk, a hunter who was lost for 27 days during June 2007 in the Arctic tundra.

Kunuk is the co-founder of the Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change Project, along with Ian Mauro of the University of Victoria's School of Environmental Studies. The goal of the project is to collect information from Inuit elders for a film about the Inuit perspective on the impact of climate change on Inuit culture and the environment. The project submitted a video to the United Nations for the 2009 COP15 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change which was presented at Denmark's National Gallery.

As of April 2011, Kunuk is developing a project with Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond about the 18th century conflict between Cree and Inuit, which lasted almost a century.

Feature films and television:

• Nunavut: Our Land (1995) Director and writer of television series
• Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) Director, producer, writer and editor
• Kunuk Family Reunion (2004) Director and producer of television documentary
• Weird Sex and Snowshoes: A Trek Through Canadian Cinematic Psyche (2004) Appeared in television documentary
• The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) Director, producer and art director
• Before Tomorrow (2008) Executive Producer
• Tungijuq (2009) Executive Producer of short
• Home (2011) Director and writer of short
• National Parks Project (2011) Director of documentary
• Searchers (2016)

• "Zacharias Kunuk". The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 29 November 2011.