Anchorage Daily News

Last April, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean and his film crew were shooting on location just outside Barrow, keeping a wary eye out for polar bears, stuffing theatrical blood down their pants to stop it from congealing.

This week, MacLean is rubbing shoulders with filmmaking icons such as Quentin Tarantino at the career-making Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

MacLean's short feature film "Sikumi (On the Ice)," about an Inupiaq hunter who witnesses a murder, was one of 83 shorts chosen from a field of 5,000. It's his second film shown at Sundance.

"I definitely still feel like I'm just some guy from Alaska," said MacLean, who grew up in Fairbanks and Barrow. "But I'm thrilled the film is doing well and people are responding to it, and are asking questions about Inupiat life and culture."

The 15-minute film is about a seal hunter named Apuna who witnesses a murder on the sea ice. Because anonymity doesn't exist in Barrow, Apuna knows both the killer and the victim.

"He has to struggle with doing the right thing, or caving in to the friend who committed the crime," said Brad Weyiouanna of Barrow, who played Apuna.

Because the town is small and isolated, MacLean said, it was an ideal microcosm for exploring how one person's actions can affect an entire community.

"It's actually a fairly universal story, but set through Andrew's lens," said film producer Cara Marcous of New York City. "I think he's telling what is really a moral decision story, in real time. I think it's specific in its portrayal of this culture, but it also connects with people regardless of where they're from."

To MacLean's knowledge, "Sikumi" is the only feature film entirely shot in the Inupiaq language. (A 2002 full-length feature from Canada, "Atanarjuat" or "The Fast Runner," used dialogue in Inuktitut, a related Inuit dialect.)

He wrote the script in English, and his mother, linguist Edna Ahgeak MacLean, helped him translate it.

"That was really important to me," he said. "Hearing Inupiaq in film and hopefully TV someday, as well, will help us re-teach ourselves the language and preserve it."

MacLean wrote and directed "Sikumi" as his master thesis project for the filmmaking program at New York University.

In April 2006, and again in April 2007, he transported a film crew, a 35 mm camera and about 40 bags of equipment to Barrow, all of which required special preparation and handling to function in the minus 20-degree temps.

"Our audio equipment kinda gave up on us with a couple days left in the shoot," MacLean said. "And all our pens froze, so we didn't have any notes about which shots were called."

Marcous' homemade blood, a concoction of Karo syrup and chocolate, kept freezing solid.

"Finally, to keep it from freezing, I carried it around in my pants," she said. "We still had to refresh it with boiling water, and in some shots you can tell it's kind of congealed into frozen candy."

But the results were worth it. MacLean's film had five showings at Sundance. At the festival, he has spoken to and learned from several directors he admires, including Morgan Spurlock ("Super Size Me") and Jason Reitman ("Juno"). He also relished the chance to network with other Native American filmmakers.

MacLean said this festival experience is worlds apart from the Sundance premiere of his documentary "Natchiliagniaqtuguk Aapagalu (Seal Hunting with Dad)" in 2005. He's done with film school now, and in a better position to take advantage of the attention. Plus, fictional work stirs up more opportunities than documentaries do.

"I'm getting a lot more interest this time around from production companies and agents and managers," he said.

The Barrow cast, however, was shocked that the people they watch in movies will now be watching them. Weyiouanna couldn't leave his job in the stock department of Arctic Slope Regional Corp. for the festival, but his parents drove to Utah from Anchorage to see his big-screen debut.

"Oh, boy, this is really something," Weyiouanna said. "My first film acting, and it's at Sundance. What an honor."

Find Sarah Henning online at adn.com/contact/shenning or call 257-4323.

SEE 'SIKUMI': Today only, the Sundance Festival is screening "Sikumi" for free on its Web site,

www.sundance.org/ festival/shorts

MORE ABOUT THE FILM: or more information on "Sikumi" and for future announcements of screenings in Alaska, follow the link from this story at

adn.com/arts

ADVERTISEMENT