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Laila Hansen, 36, is a Kalaaleq Inuit from Greenland.
She has worked as an actress, a singer-songwriter,
director and mask dancer, touring the northern latitudes,
Europe and North America. Deciding to go into film,
she went to Greenland’s home rule government
and said, “You’re going to pay for my
education, because Greenland needs a filmmaker.”
And they did.
She has directed everything from television
commercials to a hip-hop jazz Inuit musical. She
teamed up recently with Nils Vest Film, in Copenhagen,
to make “Inuk Woman City Blues,” which
she describes as a “musically poetic narration”
about four Inuit women who haunt the bars. It had
a smash opening in Copenhagen in October.
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| Laila Hansen |
| Courtesy Nils Vest Films |
When you did Inuit theater in Canada, could
they understand your language?
Oh yeah. It’s the same language same
people, same culture, in Canada, Siberia, Alaska
and Greenland. There are only different dialects.
What we did, since we are coming from this small
society and only a few people understand our language,
we made physical stuff. For instance, the mask dance
is one of the oldest ways of dancing and clowning.
What was you father’s business?
He had a grocery store and my mum was a dental assistant.
Quite modern. My grandfather was a hunter and carpenter.
So we saw civilization come too fast. I saw, as
a child, these traditional Eskimo people moving
into town. We are not a minority, we kept our language.
But in Greenland our spiritual side is very weak,
it’s like a spiritual emptiness that makes
people weak, so they try and find happiness in other
ways. But if you take the spiritual side away there’s
this emptiness. People are very lonely.
In the school, they taught us that your heritage
is all dead and you only have to see the future.
When I became an actress, I toured in small places
where people who have never seen (Inuit cultural)
theater said, "They lied to us in school."
They saw that it was alive.
Were the teachers Greenlanders or Danes?
Both. They have been taught that themselves. Also,
if you want to survive, you have to think like that.
But today young people are more connected to both
sides. It’s like awakened spirits inside. Like
we can exist in this new civilization but we can
still be on the other side.
Explain your movie.
My movie is about four women who move to Denmark
and they’re telling these stories, about what
they have inside them to be that drunken. Then we
mix in music and poetry from Greenland. It’s
a way of thinking about poetry of skid row, and
maybe it will help them get more help. I was with
these women for a long time.
The stories are very tough, of broken lives in
Greenland, longing for love and being a human, growing
up as a child and not getting what they need to
be strong. It was hard for them to go to social
workers, but it’s hard for Danish people to
understand, who are these women?
I used to walk at night by the benches where these
women slept, and I would sing to them, and talk
to them. One woman said, “Why? Why didn’t
we make anything?” Now, I could be there as
well. So it’s a story of pain, but we try to
describe it in a beautiful way, because it’s
also a story about survival.
How did the women in the film like the movie?
They liked it. Before the screening, they didn’t
want to see it, but when we showed it to them, people
were crying, very happy about it. It wasn’t
an “Oh, so sad” story. It was just the
story of the city.
The heavy drinking never leads to fights,
like in North America. The people seem quite gentle.
This is the way people are. We never went
to war, we don’t have soldiers. Our ancestors
came to Greenland because they didn’t want
to fight with all those other tribes back in Canada.
We are called Kalaaleq - people with strong shamans.
The shaman tired of these wars, and he took a spiritual
journey and saw this land of peace -- Greenland
-- and said there shall we go.
What would you say to Americans about your
culture?
My culture has a chance to enlighten people. We
are very connected to nature and this Western civilization
needs it.
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