
A Cold Place to Live Outside: Homelessness in the Canadian Arctic
Inuvik, Northwest Territories, sits above the Arctic Circle, and this film looks at what homelessness looks like in a town where winter temperatures can disable a person in minutes. It grew out of a research project led by Dr. Michael Young at the School of Humanitarian Studies, and it builds its picture entirely from people close to the problem: homeless residents describing their own circumstances, health and social service workers describing what they can and cannot offer, and government officials describing policy limits. Addiction and mental illness run through nearly every account, treated as tangled with homelessness rather than separate from it. The film does not build toward a thesis or a fix. It is structured instead as a starting point, material meant to be watched by people in a position to change local policy, with the conversation left open rather than resolved. The result is less a portrait than a case file, laying out perspectives from the street level up to the officials who set the rules.