Born and based in Nunavik, Asinnajaq (whose name means “nomadic out-of-place-maker”) is a filmmaker, writer, and visual artist whose work spans archives, dreams, and lived experience. The daughter of filmmaker Jobie Weetaluktuk and a deep-rooted cultural lineage, Asinnajaq approaches image-making as both an act of reclamation and reimagining. With Three Thousand, she unspools the past while tracing its echoes forward.

The film begins in the archives—literal ones. Asinnajaq spent months immersed in the National Film Board of Canada’s footage, watching frame after frame of early colonial representations of Inuit life. She doesn’t reject the archive; she engages with it, asks it questions, pulls it apart. In her hands, old footage isn’t just critiqued—it’s repurposed and recontextualized, layered with new animation, sound, and voice.

The animation—ethereal and hand-drawn—flows like wind over tundra. It takes us beyond anthropological gaze and into a realm of Inuit futurism. We see glowing northern landscapes and beings in motion, glimpses of an imagined Inuit future where tradition and innovation don’t collide—they coexist. These animated interludes are tender, haunting, and deeply empowering. This is not an elegy. It’s a projection. A dreamscape that doesn’t mourn the future but invites it in.

What’s radical about Three Thousand is its refusal to be only about trauma. Yes, it acknowledges the deep scars of colonization, residential schools, and dislocation. But it doesn’t stop there. Asinnajaq invites us to witness strength, beauty, and joy. Her lens is one of care—a cinematic embrace that says: look how much there is, how much there was, how much there still could be.

And it’s not just the visuals. The sound design—woven from whispers, archival narration, and ambient tones—feels like a conversation between generations. One that doesn’t just speak in sorrow, but in song.

Three Thousand has screened internationally—from Iceland to Melbourne to Toronto—and no matter where it lands, it leaves the same impression: this is what cinema can be when it listens first. It’s no surprise that Asinnajaq was later part of the curatorial team for the 2019 Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, or that she continues to be a voice shaping contemporary Inuit art across disciplines.

In an age obsessed with the new, Asinnajaq reminds us that the future is deeply connected to how we tend the past. Her work doesn’t seek to escape history but to braid it into new meaning.

Three Thousand isn’t just a film—it’s an offering. A shimmering act of resistance, restoration, and radical imagination.

And honestly? I can’t stop watching it.