In this silent-film predecessor to the modern documentary, filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty spends one year following the lives of Nanook and his family, Inuits living in the Arctic Circle.
The film is considered the first feature-length documentary, though Flaherty has been criticized for staging several sequences and thereby distorting the reality of his subjects’ lives. In 1989, this film was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
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