I took my 85-year-old mother to see the movie "The Necessities of Life" because she and my father spent four years on Baffin Island (where the movie begins) in the late 1940s (a few years before the events in the movie take place) and then they lived in Edmonton where my father, a doctor, worked in a TB hospital, treating mostly First Nations people (in those days they were called "natives"). In the movie, an Inuit man named Tivii is diagnosed with TB and leaves his wife and two daughters at home on Baffin Island and travels to a sanatorium in Quebec where he understands nothing—not the language, not the medical treatments, not the running water, not the flush toilets, not even the trees (Baffin Island is too far north to have trees), although he does understand the snow that falls outside the window through the two winters that he spends there.
Watch the trailer for The Necessities of Life.
Thanks to subtitles, I was able to understand what both Tivii and the others at the sanatorium were saying (they all spoke French) while still appreciating the wall of not-understanding that stood between the whites and a lonely Inuit man, and I recognized something of my father in the self-contained doctor who, when he lost a patient, could only show anger. For my mother the movie brought back memories of the silence of the Baffin Island landscape.
After the movie my mother walked along beside me and said "please" and "thank you" in the soft syllables of the Inuit language, as well as a longer phrase that she explained was the name the Inuit had given her: tall thin doctor’s wife with the pretty face (my father was tall and thin and my mother had the pretty face). The only word I recognized in the movie was "oovungah" (my spelling) which means "me," a word my father would often call out with enthusiasm in reply to a question like "who wants dessert?"
If my father hadn’t died in August of last year I would have taken him to the movie too, and afterward I would have asked him about the procedure that was performed on Tivii that involved puncturing his lung with a needle and inflating it with air and also about what would cause a TB patient to begin spitting up copious amounts of blood just before he died and my father would have explained everything in graphic detail. Of course, if Tivii had been sent to the hospital in Edmonton where my Dad was working, Dad could have been able to explain everything to Tivii and that would have been a totally different story.