Live, love, laugh TV Inuit best friends collaborate on series about the humour and heart of the real North By: AV Kitching Posted: 6:00 AM CST Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 Last Modified: 3:31 PM CST Monday, Jan. 6, 2025 Updates

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Inuit filmmakers Stacey Aglok MacDonald (Qanurli, The Grizzlies) and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (Angry Inuk, The Grizzlies) have collaborated on a new comedy drama, North of North, co-commissioned by CBC and Netflix in association with APTN and premièring Tuesday.

Set and shot in Nunavut, the show stars Inuk actor Anna Lambe (True Detective, Trickster, The Grizzlies) as Siaja, a young mother on the precipice of great change.

The series vividly captures Siaja’s life in the fictional Arctic community of Ice Cove, a tiny place where everyone knows everyone’s business, as she navigates her new normal after spontaneously — and very publicly — breaking up with her self-absorbed husband, Ting.

The Free Press spoke to producers, creators and best friends Aglok MacDonald and Arnaquq-Baril of Red Marrow Media to get the lowdown on what it takes to write a TV show.

Free Press: Siaja is a very relatable character, despite the fact that her life in the North is so very different to what viewers who live outside of Nunavut would be familiar with. Is she based on anyone in particular?

Aglok MacDonald: She’s a mish-mash of people we know: a young Inuk woman who has big dreams and loves her community. I think that’s something that a lot of young Inuit, including ourselves, can relate to.

There were a number of writers in the room but four of us were Inuit women — two other writers, Aviaq Johnston and Moriah Sallaffie — who have lived in the Arctic all our lives. We followed our hearts to what felt authentic, and what it’s like to live in the Arctic and have relationships with people, whether they are romantic or within the community.

FP: Everyone we meet in the show seems to have more to them than meets the eye. The characters are really well written; they are so believable. Ting, for instance, will be instantly recognizable to many women.

Arnaquq-Baril: He’s a combination of all of our worst boyfriends! The characters are fictional, but they are also very real. Anyone growing up in our communities knows somebody like them. They were years in the building and have got so many layers.

Aglok MacDonald: The characters have existed since 2018. We have so much love and tenderness for them, but there’s also frustration. The laterally violent elder is something we all have experience with. Oftentimes it’s funny and something we can laugh about and sometimes it freaking hurts.

FP: Yes, one of the things that really stood out was the humour. Super funny but at the same time there’s also that gut-punch of truth in almost every scene. Was that a deliberate decision?

Aglok MacDonald: Genre aside, it feels the most authentic way our communities are. Wish we could say it was groundbreaking, but the way we see it is not groundbreaking at all. It just kind of is.

Real and joyful is an approach we haven’t seen much, because Indigenous people haven’t been in charge of our own stories for a long time. The lens that the outside world looks at us through is very, very different from the lens that we see ourselves through.

Arnaquq-Baril: I think, as Canada shows more interest in Indigenous storytelling, you see a lot of the new content created — once you see Indigenous communities get support to do their work — and a lot of the stuff that’s happening right now is comedy. It’s what we gravitate towards.

Aglok MacDonald: Certainly I have never laughed anywhere more than I laugh than when I am at home in the Arctic. We just laugh our way through things, whether dealing with crappy boyfriends or complicated relationships with our mothers, colonial trauma, community hardship, all of that stuff. It’s something we’ve lived through our entire lives here in the Arctic.

FP: What’s it like working so closely with your best friend? How much has your relationship changed, and has that change impacted your writing?

Arnaquq-Baril: We are very close. We see each other, have dinner and wine a few nights a week and are always helping each other out. We first met 18 or 19 years ago at a beginner’s filmmaking workshop and immediately clicked — we admired each other’s ambition and drive, and have always been cheerleaders of each other’s careers. We’ve collaborated at times, but mostly worked separately until we started Red Marrow together for The Grizzlies project, which was a 10-year project.

We’ve been in the trenches together, rooting each other on, mentoring each other. We each learned different things at different times, so there’s shared learning and peer learning. When we didn’t have access to therapy, we were each other’s therapist.

Aglok MacDonald: It’s really funny to write with Alethea; we write together in different ways. I take the script away for a couple of days and then throw it back to her, and we also write collaboratively on a screen where we can see each other writing. It’s been really fun and cathartic and we’ve worked through a lot of things together, because when we’ve been writing together it’s like, “Is that real; does that come from truth; do you need to talk about that; is there something we need to unpack…”

Arnaquq-Baril: Why did you never tell me this at the time?

Aglok MacDonald: …or that second of self-doubt when you’re writing something and I can see Alethea delete-delete-delete-deleting her work and I’m like, “No no, don’t second-guess yourself, undo, put it back!” It’s really interesting and fun to work like that with her, but it was also sometimes really awkward, like when we had to write our first sex scene together… we were looking at each other like, (raises eyebrows), “Oh my god…”

Arnaquq-Baril: (laughs) Writing on this show was really intimate with all our writers, but extremely so for Stacey and me, because we were writing and rewriting the pilot script for years before we ever brought other writers in. We were already best friends but there are things that you don’t even tell your best friend that come out when you are writing a show together, pouring your guts out. It’s been really interesting not just personally but also professionally.

Aglok MacDonald: It’s scary, you are really vulnerable but it’s also empowering…

Arnaquq-Baril: … and when you are the owner of a show as well, business-wise, this is the biggest show that we’ve ever done and its really bringing us to the edges of our capacity in a lot of ways. When you are under extreme pressure and exhausted, we know each other’s grumpy vibes, we know each other’s tiredness, we know each other so fricking well now. It’s like a marriage being in business together. You can’t do a project of this scale that is also this intimate without having conflict but I think this show is what it is because we have learned how to navigate it. We have always got each other’s backs when it comes down to it and working on this has made us even closer.

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca