Inuk Jørgensen – ‘A personal approach to writing for films’

Inuk Jørgensen, an award-winning short film writer/director from Greenland, gave a short lecture to the Northern Script Youth Committee on Wednesday evening (26th of October) and he was very welcomed by the members of the Youth Committee. 

Inuk works and lives in Sweden as the Head of the film department of Nordiska folkhögskolan but he is a Greenlandic inuit and very proud and aware of his inuit roots. In his lecture he talked about the importance of telling a short film story by using a personal approach in them.

We are all unique persons with different stories to be told.  According to Inuk, the more personal the story is- the more interesting it gets. He used his own short film –’In the shadow of the Tugtupite’ (2020) as an example of a short story. The film explores the beauty of Greenland, while questioning the extractive industries taking from these lands and worrying about the long term effects of these harmful activities. The Film has been awarded in many Film festivals all over the world and it touches subjects such as: human rights, Nordic, historical, local vs global, colonisation, geopolitics, history, arctic and indigenous peoples of Greenland.

In his short film Inuk doesn’t want to point any fingers but he does tell the story from the inuit point of view and from his own point of view.  The location of the film is Inuk’s own home village where he grew up and therefore the story has a very personal twist in it. Inuk also uses the greenlandic folktales in his short film and pointed out to us that the Inuit folklore doesn’t view the world the same way as the Western world. Greenlandic folk tales actually don’t have individual heroes but instead it is the community who is the hero.

All the way through his lecture Inuk kept emphasizing the importance of personality in the short stories and the Nordic unique way of telling the stories. As we cannot compete with Hollywood with big budgets – we should instead focus on the Nordic perspective and the unique Nordic way of telling our stories. According to Inuk, personal stories written from your own background in mind are always interesting for the viewer. 

After listening Inuk talking to us on Wednesday and watching his Greenlandic short film, I can see the big personal touch he indeed has put on his short film. 

Inuk ended his lecture by saying ‘Short Films are perfect to carry on a feeling’. I hope the new generation of Nordic scriptwriters will take the torch forward regarding Inuk’s message about carrying feelings with their short stories and continue to write Nordic stories which touch the viewer deeply inside. 

Northern Script camp is held this year during the Oulu International Children’s & Youth Film Festival 14th-20th of November in Oulu, Finland.

Check out our web pages regarding the scriptwriting camp.

New information coming soon!