MONTREAL: Premiering at Montreal’s World Film Festival this week, Benoît Pilon’s Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life), about an Inuit hunter’s painful confrontation with white culture in the 1950s, offers an unusual theme for a Quebec film.

While storylines featuring French Canadians struggling to integrate in the wider English world is a well-worn one in la belle province, a film exploring how non-French speaking foreigners adapt when confronted with Quebec culture is a rarity. In this case, the stranger is unilingual Inuit hunter Tivii — played by Natar Ungalaaq (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) — who is shipped to a Quebec City tuberculosis sanatorium.

‘It’s not a Quebec story — it’s a universal one. It’s about culture shock. Tivii can’t fully exist because he can’t communicate,’ Pilon told Playback Daily shortly after the film’s premiere. Best known for his documentaries Nestor et les oubliés, Des nouvelles du Nord and Roger Toupin, épicier variété, the new film is Pilon’s first feature-length drama.

Produced by Bernadette Payeur (The Novena), Ce qu’il faut pour vivre was written by veteran filmmaker Bernard Émond (The Novena) more than 15 years ago. It opens on 14 screens across Quebec Aug. 29 through Seville Pictures.

Ungalaaq plays a hunter forced to leave his family for two years after contracting tuberculosis. Unable to communicate and longing for his life on the land, he falls into suicidal despair until a well-meaning nurse introduces him to a young Inuit boy who is also hospitalized.

‘Tivii comes to life because he is able to speak and transmit his culture to the young boy,’ says Pilon. For his part, Ungalaaq wanted to make a film to honor his grandfather.

‘My grandfather had a similar experience. He got sick and had to leave. It happened to people all over the North — and some didn’t come back,’ says the Nunavut born actor.