It would have been too precious for Winter’s Yearning to have been titled Waiting for Alcoa, yet Beckett’s existential drama looms large in Sturla Pilskog and Sidse Torstholm Larsen’s documentary, in which the inhabitants of a southern town in Greenland wait in vain for the arrival of a multi-billion dollar smelting plant from the American aluminium multinational. Winter’s Yearning opens with a news clip of the former prime minister of Greenland, Kuupik V. Kleist, warning viewers about the precarious state of the national economy, which is currently propped up by profits from fishery exports and a $500 million dollar annual subsidy from Denmark: “We are in need of establishing other significant economic activities,” he urges – “anything.” Title cards then tell us that in 2006 the American aluminium corporation Alcoa announced plans to build a smelting plant in nation’s southwestern town of Maniitsoq, and the investment may help deliver Greenland its full independence from Denmark. The news is enthusiastically welcomed by Maniitsoq’s residents. That an industrial project from a global multinational could meaningfully bring freedom to a local indigenous community seems, to a jaded leftist viewer, deeply suspect. But having a paid job, however slight, may be better than having no job at all. Inclusion into a fundamentally unequal global economic order that puts corporate rights over democratic ones may be slightly better than not being in it. Capitalism, this unhappy world asks us, or barbarism? It doesn’t matter if the two are in essence one and the same; the former, at least, can vastly enrich a select few.
More than a decade later, Alcoa has yet to materialise. Winter’s Yearning follows three residents of Maniitsoq who have continued to live out their usual patterns in the snowy, smelter-free town since the grand announcement of 2006: Peter and Gideon, two middle-aged men with steady jobs, and Kirsten, a younger woman who yearns for excitement elsewhere. Peter is the local aluminium coordinator with Alcoa. The company had initially found some candidates from Denmark but they wanted someone local. As the first Greenlander with a Master’s degree, Peter got the job. Gideon is an alcohol addiction therapist, while Kirsten works at a local fisheries factory. Though their lives barely cross, all three are trying to discover what it means to live independently in a landscape that demands so much supplication – to wealthier Denmark; to American corporate giants; to their own worst selves. We follow them across local bars strung in neon-green fairy lights, elderly care homes, churches celebrating baptisms, and whaling expeditions. If Peter grounds the immediate context of the film as a disillusioned Alcoa liaison, Gideon and Kirsten provide its emotional core, presenting complementary stories of finding genuine autonomy through reckoning with their most repressed and difficult selves. The two, we learn, have each had issues with alcoholism. By confronting their pasts, they learned what they actually want to give to the world. While doing community service Kirsten realises that she wanted to be healthcare assistant, and Gideon hosts support groups for the partners of those suffering from addiction. The open, expansive framing – a wide shot of a classroom of women in energetic discussion; empty landscapes occasionally filled with wind-battered blasts of snow – lend an understated, indeterminate tone to the narrative, preventing this part of the film from becoming needlessly prescriptive or moralistic As Miranda Mungai points out on the Open City London website, Winter’s Yearning is not so much an exploration of how abstract principles filter through life, but rather the particularities of individual lives themselves.
In the end, the subjects of Winter’s Yearning are less interested in Alcoa than they are in self-determination. Kirsten, Gideon, and Peter’s respective discovery of their own paths mirrors the understated but always present meta-narrative of Greenland moving towards its own independence. Women in care homes urge Kirsten to remember Greenland’s ancestors; Peter pursues his education upon the urging of his parents to “fight the Danes to the finish”; and the front pages of local newspapers proclaim the public’s increasing appetite for national independence. But what does it mean to be free in a way that also acknowledges one’s genuine constraints? Watching it, I remembered reading a quote from the late Marxist historian Moishe Postone – he was my undergraduate teacher, and I was mourning his passing – that thundered into my consciousness when I first read it and has stayed there ever since:
“The main idea that I try to impart is that human beings are driven by unconscious impulses and, further, that the more those unconscious impulses are repressed, the more humans will be driven by them. Therapy is thus a kind of sober emancipation. It doesn’t make you happy, but it makes you more self-determining than you had been, by destroying the illusion that you were self-determining before […] there really is this sense of—you could live differently.”
The idea that freedom is acquired through one moment of glorious, absolute emancipation from the world and all its violence is a lie. Living meaningfully might require you to recognise constraints as they exist, while also tending to the truths you hold dear as much as possible. Gideon, Kirsten, and Peter understood this early. Faced by saviour-figures in the form of neighbouring nations, multi-billion dollar industrial deals, or just the seductive abyss of self-destruction, they turn away from quick victories. “We must stop the thought that Alcoa will save the town,” Gideon says; 2006’s news has made the town’s residents, he claims, “passive and hesitant.” Their freedom is not so much a conquest for something specific and external than it is a slow, laboured march towards self-understanding and generosity. Tend to what you can.
After all, the world can take so much. As I write, Greenland has become the unfortunate subject of an international news story around an attempted American land-grab. Trump wants natural resources; Greenland’s geopolitical positioning makes it good for economic and military strategy once the Arctic is opened up; what good are the melting ice sheets if you can’t mine the new mineral deposits and political opportunities that will emerge from their waste? Politicians, resource extraction, capital flows, and geopolitical drama dominate these discussions about Greenland: it is almost as if, as Nick Martin points out in The New Republic, people don’t actually live there. In a world beholden only to material interests, human lives recede into the background. It does not have to be this way, at least in the small worlds we create for ourselves to make the larger one tolerable. As Gideon urges a class to remember to attend to their own needs, one woman asks him “Why do we Greenlanders have this tendency to be submissive?” He counters “I’m a Greenlander too, and I don’t feel like that!” You can always live differently.
Rebecca Liu is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers
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