Marijke van Warmerdam: ‘In the fall of 1995, I took the course History of documentary at the New School in New York. I could hardly believe what I saw during the first lectures: Lumière, Flaherty, Vertov and so on. It was somehow so close to what I’d made in the preceding years and yet I’d never even heard of them until that moment. Quite a shock! Particularly due to one scene in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. A canoeist and a mother with children emerge from a canoe -followed by even more children and finally a dog too. They all appear like wonderful rabbits of various sizes out of a magician’s hat!
Nanook of the North made a deep impression on me at the time, and also when I recently watched this scene again. It even led me to make a new film, Fast Forward in which the journey itself is more important than the final destination.’