Restless River: Subtitling as Languaging Inuit Diversity in Canada

In a time when the Arctic is receiving more attention, Arnait Video Productions, the first independent production company made by Arctic women, is recently promoting the unique culture and voices of Inuit women in order to celebrate the specificity of the culture of women in Igloolik and represent their perspectives and values within larger national and international discussions. Such a film with subtitles as Restless River (2019), written and directed by Marie-Hélène Cousineau in collaboration with Madeline Ivalu, not only envisions its own detailed blueprints of Inuit communiti es as opposed to the social norms of the colonisers, but is also an audiovisual narrati ve of female identi ty constructi on. My central purpose will be to re-read the aforementioned fi lm from a cognitive perspective projecting such a conceptual metaphor as “Subtitling is Languaging Diversity”. I will analyse the linguistics of subtitling from a cogniti ve perspective in order to demonstrate that nati ve minoriti es may be conceptualised in subtitling and that Inuit ethnicity is reproduced faithfully in audiovisual media. Through such an Inuit movie as Restless River, whose dramati c story of female identi ty constructi on is endowed with parabolic power, subtitling seems to confer prominence to Inuit minorities challenging dominant, homogenising systems.