(courtesy IMP Awards)
Stories of empowerment generally take the form of someone discovering they are lost and trapped in a place shorn of agency and vivacity who then takes steps to change their lives in ways that are triumphant and overcoming.
But while these stories are meant to be inspiring, what they sometimes lack is some relatable grounded humanity, the kind that acknowledges that even though tenacity, hard work and a powerful vision will get you a long, and clearly successful way, that that doesn’t mean you won’t have troubles on your way.
Enter North of North, a wholly delightful, very funny and immensely emotionally honest accounting of one woman’s journey from a place of stagnation to one of life and self-empowering happiness with, rather happily for us mere mortals with more than enough feet of clay for one lifetime, more than a few challenges and self-defeating flaws along to a better, if not perfect, place.
Centred on Inuk woman Siaja (Anna Lambe), North of North is set in the small fictional Nunavut (Canada) settlement of Ice Cove, a proud community that has plenty of spirit, a strong and abiding connection to land and culture but which wouldn’t mind a little more money to fix roof leaks and run a year-round program to connect its people even more deeply to their culture and each other.
Being a small settlement, everyone knows everyone’s business, which can be a good thing, or, and this is pertinent for Siaja, not a good thing when you decide at the age of 26, that you’ve had enough of a stale, one-way marriage to a handsome narcissist (town golden boy, Ting, played with a well-rounded mix of un-self awareness and vulnerability by Kelly William) and decide to set out on your own.
Which might be fine if you had a job – Siaja does not – a place of your own – she does not; her only option is moving in with her recovering alcoholic, sober ten years mum, Neevee (Maika Harper) who has some issues of her own – and a clear path to shared custody of feistily sweet daughter Bun (Keira Cooper).
But that’s where impulsively recreating your life can be both terrifying and fun.
As North of North gears up, Siaja finds solutions, if imperfect ones, to all the issues at hand, and while she undoubtedly takes some pretty massive steps forward, most notably as the executive assistant to town manager Helen (Mary Lynn Rajskub) who as a white woman is both aware of and hilariously disconnected from the needs of the Inuk people she ostensibly serves, she also takes some pretty big ones backward too.
Or at least some considerable stumbles sideways but then isn’t that what being a real person is all about?
You might set out with lofty goals, and you might even realise a number of them, but you won’t do it perfectly, and there’s a good chance that you’ll have an audience of family, friends – her close buddies Millie (Zorga Qaunaq) and Colin (Bailey Poching) are a DELIGHT and great comedic relief to the show’s sometimes dramatic elements – and critical townspeople watching on.
It means that everything you do, from the good (jazzing up Elders Night, picking up large goods on rubbish collection day) to the bad (Elders Night being jazzed up) is on full public display, turning you into some sort of reality TV tryhard when all you want to do is just have a better life.
What makes Siaja as a character work is not just Lambe’s brilliantly nuanced acting, which captures the highs and the lows of her very public life reinvention just-so, but the writing of North of North which always dances a fine and highly entertaining life between the absurdly funny and the unmissably serious.
For a sparkling clever sitcom, North of North is also able to be deeply and substantially thoughtful without feeling like its shoehorning its more dramatic elements awkwardly into its effervescently heartfelt comedy.
This ability to balance the comedic and the dramatic means that the show can raise issues like the residential schools that devastated Inuk families and culture over many decades in Canada and the propensity of white people to feel the need to either “save” Inuk people or use their rich culture and lands for their own ends.
Handled poorly, these issues could have sunk the silly, fun and rewardingly over-the-top quirky comedy that North of North often is, but instead they feel like an organic part of it, and even more importantly, are given space and time to be heard in-between all the deftly-landed jokes.
Also given appropriate space in the sitcom are some fairly major personal issues from Siaja dealing with a self-involved husband whom everyone else thinks is the best thing since sliced bread to the reveal of a major new person in her life whose connection to her mother accelerates Siaja’s life in ways she doesn’t see coming but which are largely quite positive.
North of North is a show with heart and soul and lots of laughs, which over eight 25-ish minute episodes does a beautiful job of world-building for those unfamiliar with actual Inuk culture – North of North‘s creators, Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, work largely in Nunavut and their mission is to dispel the myths associated with the pejorative term “Eskimo”, the use of which rests solely with Inuk who have reclaimed it much as gays have reclaimed “faggot” and Black people have taken back the N-word – and showing us that there is a universality to everyone in every part of the world even as they are unmissably unique too.
You will laugh, you will cry and you will have your worldview joyously blown open by North of North which is quite simply one of the best comedies Netflix has going for it at the moment, and which, in an age of polarisation and a lack of willful misunderstanding and a dearth of empathy, makes a beautiful case for how rich this world can be and how everyone simply wants the chance to make a better life for themselves, no matter how many repairable pitfalls may lie along the way.
North of North streams on Netflix.
Another interview with the North of North team …