Producer Emile Hertling Péronard has been taking his first steps into new media this week as part of the team pitching Thunder And Drum as a DocLab Forum Project.
Péronard is the Greenlandic co-producer of the project, which also has Canadian and Danish producers, Charles S. Roy for La Maison de prod and Peter Fisher for Khora VR. The director is François Blouin (a stage director, performance artist and clown who has put on big productions for Cirque Du Soleil).
“I’ve been producing traditional documentaries, but this idea was presented to me by a Canadian friend of mine and it just seemed timely, relevant and fun to try to explore new media,” Péronard says of Thunder and Drum.
“To begin with, it was a VR project. Then we developed it into a mixed reality installation project where you get together in a group of 10 to 20 people and you have the AR goggles, and you have a physical experience.”
Thanks to Covid, though, the project has been refined yet again. Now, it is a mobile app that you can use wherever you want. Through it, you discover the work of two indigenous artists, Greenlandic drum dancer Varna Marianne Nielsen and Canadian multidisciplinary artist Natasha Kanapé Fontaine.
“That’s really the project, to unite indigenous artists across the colonial borders. We basically consider ourselves one people but national borders have separated us through colonising history. In that context, I think it is really interesting to see how new media can bring us back together.”
Varna Nielsen Apaloo is drum dancer and performer. She is in a direct bloodline from one of the last Greenlandic shamen. “The idea of doing something with her around trance and trance technique with the drums is very interesting.” The aim is to approach traditional techniques and rituals in an artistic context.
Péronard is one of the driving forces behind filmmaking in Greenland. “It is really all about having the chance to tell our own stories. With documentary, new media and filmmaking in general, it’s an incredibly important time to be able to give our point of view on the culture and history of Greenland, which has only been told by outsiders. We are seeing a huge shift in stories which are told on the inside by Greenlanders,” the producer says.
Péronard, whose production company is based between Denmark and Greenland, is determined to challenge the clichés and ignorance surrounding Greenland. His mission is to “nurture new voices” from the Arctic, Greenland and the North Atlantic.
As well as being a prominent producer, Péronard is also the industry director of the Nuuk International Film Festival which took place in Greenland earlier this autumn. This is one part of the world where coronavirus hasn’t taken hold.
“Greenland has been spared, more or less. I think there has been in total 17 or 18 cases of Covid since the pandemic started – no hospitalisations and no deaths. Greenland is also, of course, a society where it is very easy to isolate. You can’t really travel between communities. If you have a case in one community, it is very easy to keep it away from all the others.”
The Nuuk festival was able to carry on a physical event. “Just to be able to have a film festival and see films with an audience was simply amazing,” the producer enthuses.
