anook of the North (also known as Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic) is a 1922 American silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty, with elements of docudrama, at a time when separating films into documentary and drama did not yet exist.

In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk man named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic. The film is considered the first feature-lengthdocumentary. Some have criticized Flaherty for staging several sequences,^[1] but the film is generally viewed as standing “alone in its stark regard for the courage and ingenuity of its heroes.”^[2][3]

In 1989, this film was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyrLwNd9Rm4]