
Last Days of the Arctic
Ragnar Axelsson, known professionally as RAX, has spent his career photographing the Inuit hunters of Greenland and Baffin Island in Canada, and this film follows his camera into a way of life that is disappearing under him. The images are stark black and white: dog sleds crossing sea ice that used to hold through winter and now breaks early, hunters reading weather patterns that no longer behave the way their fathers taught them, faces weathered by a climate turning unpredictable. Axelsson has worked in the Far North long enough to photograph the same families and the same ice across decades, so the film can show change as a before-and-after rather than an abstraction. There is little narration beyond his own account of what he has seen shift, region by region, hunt by hunt. The film stays close to his photographs and his voice, letting a single photographer's record stand in for a culture running out of the ice it depends on.