Robert Flaherty spent years in the Canadian Arctic before turning his footage of an Inuit man named Nanook and his family into this silent film, widely credited as the first feature-length documentary. The camera follows Nanook building an igloo by hand, hunting seal through a breathing hole in the ice, trading furs at a remote outpost, and traveling by kayak and dog sled across the Hudson Bay region. Flaherty staged several sequences and had his subjects use tools already fading from use, choices that have made the film a standard case study in documentary ethics ever since. None of that changes how physical the footage is: the ice, the cold, and the labor of staying alive in it come through without narration doing the explaining, carried instead by intertitles and the images themselves. Watched today it works as both a record of a way of life Flaherty wanted preserved on film and an early lesson in how documentary truth gets constructed rather than simply captured.