Robert J. Flaherty spent months living with an Inuit family near Hudson Bay before shooting this silent record of their daily survival. Allakariallak, credited as Nanook, leads his family through walrus hunts, seal fishing through ice holes, and the construction of an igloo, its clear ice block set into the wall as a window. The film moves from a trading post, where Nanook trades furs and marvels at a gramophone, out onto open ice and tundra where the real work of staying alive happens. Flaherty shot with a hand-cranked camera in extreme cold, and title cards carry the narration since sound recording was not yet practical for location work. Some sequences were staged or reenacted at Flaherty's direction, including hunting methods the family had already abandoned for rifles, a fact that has shadowed the film's reputation as much as it launched it. What survives is still the template for observational documentary filmmaking, and the images of igloo-building and harpoon hunting remain the reason it gets watched a century later.