Leonard Kamerling

'What can you do except change...?' Thirty years in the life of a Maasai family.

"Heart of the Country" is the story of Shinichi Yasutomo, the extraordinary principal of a rural elementary school in Kanayama, central Hokkaido, Northern Japan. Yasutomo is a man driven by his vision for learning and his passion for educating the heart as well as the mind. The film follows Yasutomo, his teachers and staff, students and their families over the course of one entire school year. The film is also the story of the families of Kanayama. Parents and elders of this once impoverished town embrace Yasutomo's vision, but not without wary glances back to the past. This small community, bound together by love for its children, is also defined by its journey through the cultural upheavals of postwar Japan.

Immaluuraq ("Joe Sun" in English) grew up moving among seasonal camps in the Kobuk River region of Alaska now resides in Shungnak. In this film, he describes the life of the earlier Kobuk settlements. He talks about women being isolated from the village when they are menstruating or when they are pregnant. He also talks about the predictions of the legendary Inupiaq prophet, Maniilaq, who was his great uncle. Maniilaq foretold of things to come that would change the world and the way people lived in it, all of which happened just the way he said it would. Immaluuraq's talk is known as uqaaqtuaq. Such talks were given by elders to young people who came seeking information and advice.

IIrgu is an elder from the Siberian Yupik Eskimo village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. As two grandchildren listen, IIrgu recounts events in Gambell from the time the first missionaries arrived. His story is known as an ungipamsuk or true historical narrative. With ambivalent feelings, he describes more recent changes -- how whaling practices have changed, how life has become easier, but also how younger generations are losing touch with the old ways.

This film gives an intimate look at a way of life of which most of us have seen only glimpses. Dance was once at the heart of Yupik Eskimo spiritual and social life. It was the bridge between the ancient and the new, the living and the dead and a person's own power and the greater powers of the unseen world.

This is a film about change and contemporary life in Shungnak, a village on the Kobuk River in northwestern Alaska, 75 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The film reveals that life along the Kobuk River is still inextricably linked to the harsh and starkly beautiful land, where the December sun rises at 11 a.m. and sets three hours later. An old man shares his feelings about the changes he has seen: "Long ago, forest fires put themselves out. Today, even when men fight them, they burn. I think our earth is getting old, and when things get old and dry they burn. Our earth is the same way," he adds. "It's ready to burn. I think it's coming close to the time when we will have a new one."

Walrus as well as whales are hunted by the Eskimos of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. As the film opens, an old man tells of the dangers of moving ice, how people used to drift on such ice and never return. A cluster of men stand on a snowy rooftop, scanning the sea ice for walrus, when one spots a skin boat in distress far out on the ice. The crew had not come home the night before, and now were drifting toward Siberia. Long ago, there was nothing that could have been done to save them. Today, the men call the Coast Guard. The next day, preparations for another walrus hunt are made. The hunters load the boat and travel fifty miles out to sea, where they spot two walrus sunning themselves on an ice floe. "Don't move," one hunter tells the camera. The walrus are shot, admired, butchered on the ice, and loaded onto the boat. Back in the village, the meat is cut again and hung to dry.

Gambell, Alaska is a Yup'ik-speaking Eskimo community on St. Lawrence Island on the Bering Sea. Here, as on the coast, sea mammals are still the major source of food. During their three-week Spring migration through the Bering Channel, whales are hunted using a combination of traditional organization and recently introduced technology such as motors and darting guns. A bowhead whale weighs about one ton per foot, and may reach seventy feet in length. Working together, even fifteen Eskimo skin boats with up to ten persons on each boat cannot assure a safe venture or the taking of a whale.

Four sequences, filmed over a two-month period, portray aspects of the lives of the people of Tununak, a village on the south-western coast of Alaska.