Perhaps best known for her screen version of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, British film-maker Sarah Gavron's Anglo-Danish documentary turns a warm eye on four seasons, most of them inhospitably cold, in the small Inuit township of Niaqornat in north-west Greenland. Most of the 50-odd inhabitants are related to one another, a rare exception being a newcomer from the south whose job it is to go from house to house, each of them wooden and painted in cheerful pastel colours, collecting human shit which he dumps in the sea.
There's a shortage of girls, fish, work, entertainment and polar bears. The population is shrinking, old traditions are dying, suicide rates are rising, and there's the prospect of the government cancelling the supply ship that makes regular visits between May and December. But the inhabitants seem surprisingly cheerful and have recently reopened the local fish plant as a cooperative venture. It's a beautiful, austere movie, and a sequence in which a cruise ship puts in for the day, its passengers believing they're in touch at last with an authentic primitive community, is both funny and oddly touching.