Map of the Human Heart

In 1931, in a village in the Arctic, the British mapmaker Walter Russell picks twelve-year-old Avik, an Inuit boy, as his guide. When the boy contracts tuberculosis, Walter takes him to a hospital in Montreal. There Avik meets a girl called Albertine. Ten years later Avik is a flier in the British air force and runs into Albertine again in London. Vincent Ward's film shoots the polar landscapes and the war scenes at the same scale; the sequence of the bombing of Dresden became the most discussed part of it. The telling is a love story, but its real subject is belonging: Avik is not fully in place in his village, or in Montreal, or in London. There is also something that belongs to the film's period; the word used for the Inuit character is one nobody uses now, and it was the habit of those years. Jason Scott Lee and Anne Parillaud take the leads.