Zacharias Kunuk's film career began when he sold three of his own sculptures and used the proceeds to buy his first professional film camera. He made Atanarjuat in his hometown of Igloolik, Canada, with an entirely Inuit cast and spoken only in Inuit. This epic, set at some point in the first millennium, is an interpretation of a myth from oral tradition, in which the protagonist is unjustly accused of a crime and expelled from the community, to which he can only return if he defeats a shaman. It had its world premiere in Cannes, where it won the Caméra d’Or.