The Iñupiat are an Indigenous people native to northern Alaska who, for centuries, have lived mostly in seaside villages north of the Arctic Circle. With many of their villages inaccessible by roads, most Iñupiat continue to subsist by hunting and harvesting local animals and plants. And, as the film Anaiyyun: Prayer for the Whale illustrates, no creature is so central to the community’s subsistence, as well as its cultural and spiritual life, as the whale, which can often feed an entire village. With gorgeously framed imagery from Kiliii Yüyan, a Nanai/Hèzhé (East Asian Indigenous) and Chinese American photographer and filmmaker who specialises in documenting the lives of Indigenous peoples across the globe, the film shows the scenes surrounding the capture of a bowhead whale in the Iñupiat village of Utqiaġvik. More than just a hunt, the act is a spiritual practice, imbued with rituals and prayers that have bound Iñupiat communities for generations.
Director: Kiliii Yüyan
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators
8 minutes
video
Sports and games
Havana’s streets become racetracks in this exhilarating portrait of children at play
5 minutes
video
Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
4 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
video
Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat
19 minutes
video
Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
video
Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes