2 weeks Ago By Alejandra Palés
The zombies of , the capitalist anguish of or the technological terror of They don't exactly invite relaxation. Current television fiction doesn't allow for optimism about the direction of the world, but every now and then a spark of light appears that makes us look at life with a little more joy, even if its artistic aspirations are lesser. This is the case with Netflix), set in the Canadian Arctic and starring a young Inuit woman.
The series, designed for viewers looking for cozy fiction, is relatively short—one season of eight half-hour episodes—making it perfect for watching on Netflix. . Siaja (Anna Lambe) is 26 years old, but she's been living an adult life for a long time: she married her first and only boyfriend, Ting, right after finishing high school and has a 7-year-old daughter, Bun.
Her childhood and adolescence weren't easy either because she is the daughter of a single mother with alcoholism problems, which she has now overcome. With this in mind, and realizing that her husband is a textbook narcissist, Siaja decides to turn her life upside down by separating from him and getting a job at the town's community center. The only drawback is that in the small town of Ice Cove, everyone knows everyone else's lives and has an opinion on them.
It moves within the territory of series that praise human relationships and village life and, in addition, allows us to take a look at the life of the Inuit community, spread across Canada, Alaska and Greenland and very little represented in television fiction. It's a co-production between Canadian public television, the CBC, and Netflix, which distributes the series beyond Canada. Five days after its premiere, the series is already in fourth place among the most-watched fiction programs on the platform in Spain.
Searching for Authenticity One of the goals of the series' creators, Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, was to seek authenticity in the portrayal of the current Inuit community, of which they are a part. Filming took place in Iqaluit, the capital of the Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, the most populated. Instead of focusing on a real village, the two writers decided to create a fictional one, Ice Cove, to "better capture the diversity of Inuit life across the region," Netflix explains.
"We wanted to make a series that felt believable and real to both of us and to Inuit everywhere. We want Inuit everywhere to feel seen and represented," says Arnaquq-Baril. In fact, the series is the first of its magnitude to be filmed in the Arctic.
Given the challenges of filming in a territory marked by snow and ice, the production built two of the series' most frequently featured interior sets in Iqaluit: the community center and the store run by Siaja's mother, Neevee. The remaining interior sets were built in Toronto, dismantled piece by piece, and shipped to Iqaluit, where they were reassembled..
