Melting Barricades and the Sound of a Revolution: Inuk Silis Hoegh in Nuuk

In this special guest episode of The Dubcast with Dubside, Dubside sits down with acclaimed Greenlandic filmmaker and artist Inuk Silis Hoegh for a wide-ranging conversation recorded aboard a boat in Nuuk Harbor.

They explore Inuk’s creative journey—from his early short films and fiction work to his powerful documentary Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution, which chronicles the legendary Greenlandic rock band whose music helped ignite cultural self-determination in the 1970s. The discussion also revisits Melting Barricades, Inuk’s provocative 2004 performance art project that imagined a Greenlandic army resisting cultural invasion—an idea that feels newly resonant today.

Along the way, Inuk reflects on art, identity, colonial history, archival memory, and the challenges of filmmaking in the Arctic, including mosquitoes, frost, and fleeting windows of green. The episode closes with insights into his recent land-art film installation The Green Land and his ongoing documentary work.

Melting Barricades

Sumé The Sound of A Revolution

Transcript

[DUBSIDE]
Welcome to the Dubcast With Dubside. This is a special guest edition of the Dubcast. I'm going to be talking to Inuk Silis Hoegh, who is a noted filmmaker and artist in Greenland. And his mother and father are also very distinguished people. I talked to him about some of the films he's done. And I asked him about a piece of, I guess, performance art, you could call it, that he did in 2004. It was called “Melting Barricades”. And you can actually see a key piece of this. It was a five-minute video online.

It's under www.boundary2.org. Boundary and the number two, O-R-G. Interesting film.

The idea being that the Greenland needs to recruit an army to defend itself. He'll talk about some more. He also did a film some years after that, a documentary about the band Sumé.

And I did a song by Sumé in Dubcast number 41. As documented in the film, Sumé in the ‘ 70s was the first Greenlandic rock band to sing in the Greenlandic language. And they were very inspirational and influential in the movement for Greenland self-determination.

Back when this movie came out, I bought the DVD. I don't know if they're still printing the DVDs. But if you look around the line, I think you can find a way to see this film.

It's called Sumé, S-U-M-É, The Sound of a Revolution. I talked to Inuk in July of 2025. And we're in Nuuk, and he took me out into the harbor in his motorboat, so we could have a quieter place to interview.

Towards the end, you can actually hear the water lapping against the sides of the boat. So this is somewhat under half an hour. 
All right, so today is the 25th of July.

[INUK] 
25th of July, it is, yeah. 

[DUBSIDE] 
And I'm on a boat in the Nuuk. So I'm talking to Inuk Silius Hoegh.

I got that, I got that right? 

[INUK] 
Yeah. 

[DUBSIDE] 
All right, very good.

And you are a filmmaker, you could say, artist and filmmaker, yeah? And I know that you come from a very distinguished family lineage, with a father who's made books for years and a very successful photographer.

[INUK]
Yeah, Inuk Silius, yeah.

[DUBSIDE]
I met him the first time I came to Greenland in 2004, actually, in Qaqartoq. And your mother is a very noted artist, maybe the patron saint of the arts in Greenland, you could say?

[INUK]
I don't know about that, but she, yeah, there were a few artists back in the ‘70s that kind of shaped a new generation of Greenlandic artists, in a time where it was very much, we were kind of taking back our identity. And she was the first to paint the Mother of the Sea, which is a big deity here in Greenland.

[DUBSIDE]
And so you've been making films for quite some time, right?

[INUK]
Yeah, I went to a film school in England, and I graduated back in ’96, and then worked with films most of the time after that, but also art, and went to Art Academy also later. So I've been shifting, I'm a bit schizophrenic in the arts, so I sometimes make art and sometimes make films, and I get tired of one thing, I go do the other.

Yeah, but in the later, my latest project, "The Green Land”, it's a land art film installation. I seem to finally marry the two sides of me into one project.

[DUBSIDE]
A land installation?

[INUK]
It's a land art film installation. Yeah, it's about a color green invading a landscape in Greenland. And so it's a film installation, but it's actions that have taken place out in nature that's captured.

[DUBSIDE] 
Where is this going to be installed? 

[INUK] 
Right now it's at the National Gallery of Iceland on an exhibition, and it's been exhibited here in Greenland and in Copenhagen last year. So yeah, and I take any invitation to show it elsewhere.

[DUBSIDE]
All right. Well, I'm familiar with some of your early films. The Sinilluarit, the short one?

Yeah. Was that all you're doing? Are you a part of that?

[INUK]
It was a short film that I wrote and directed. It was my first film.

And it was also the first time, some say that we made a Greenlandic film, like the whole team Greenlandic that's from here. Our film history is not that long.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah. It's a couple of different versions of it. There was a promotional DVD that it was on.

It's used in a couple of places, but since it has English subtitles, I can appreciate it. But I got to say that the scene where he's standing in front of the refrigerator, I laughed so hard. That's very funny.

[INUK]
Thank you. It's a little bit silly, that film, but it's also fun to look back at what you've done when you were younger.


[DUBSIDE]
Then you made the one about the band with the Chili Friday guys.

[INUK]
You mean The Sound of a Revolution?

[DUBSIDE]
No, no, no, no, no, no. Before that. 

[INUK] 
About what, did you say?

[DUBSIDE] 
The band, the Chili... It's not Chili Friday, but...

[INUK]
Ah, Chili Friday. Yeah, yeah. It's a band that was called Chili Friday.

It's a fiction short film. Yeah, it's called Eskimo Weekend.

[DUBSIDE]
I didn't want to say the name of the film because we're still uptight about using the E-word in my mind.

[INUK]
No, it was in 2000, I think it came out in 2002 or something. It wasn't such a big deal back then, but of course, it's on purposely a little bit provocative title because we can call ourselves Eskimos, and other people's are not really.

[DUBSIDE]
Black folks in the U.S. can use the N-word, but us white people can't say it. Yeah, yeah, so you were trying to be a little provocative.

[INUK]
Yeah, no, or it's just like a self-ironic, I guess. Because the people in the film are really copying Western life, really, kind of.

[DUBSIDE]
Okay. You got this like rock star kind of a thing going on.

[INUK]
Rock star kind of a thing. It's a little bit of a... I don't know.

I would like to say that it was on purpose that it's kind of have a B-movie feel.

[DUBSIDE]
Okay.

[INUK]
It's very kind of overly romantic, cliché kind of feel to it. But you still had some good touches in there.

[DUBSIDE]
The scene where the guitar player and Malik, the main guy, are having this argument with the music. It's like a Greenland drum dance kind of a thing, but with rock music. That's a nice mix of the traditional values with the modern kind of a thing.

I thought that was very effective.

[INUK]
Yeah, it was fun to make. It was people coming together with the ideas and very improvised. So it was a modern drum battle with guitars.

[DUBSIDE]
So did you have that written at any time? Or was that just an idea that kind of evolved as you were doing it?

[INUK]
There was a rough script. And it was about the main idea about a rock band with a lead that had trouble with love. And then his fight to get back this girl.

Yeah. And then a twist in, what do you say, a battle inside the band with the other guy in the band about this girl. 
Yeah. It really was supposed to start like a film about Greenlandic rock music, like a more documentary. And then I was working together with a guy called Jan de Vreode, who's a Belgian guy.

And then it evolved into more of a fiction film about youth culture in Nuuk.

[DUBSIDE]
So then more of a real documentary became the Sumé film, Sound of Revolution. Tell me about that.

[INUK]
Well, Sumé is really kind of a band that's almost like a national band of Greenland. Because back in the ‘70s, early ‘70s, nobody was singing in Greenlandic rock. There was copying American and European rock singing in English.

And Sumé was the first band that made a record where they were singing in political lyrics and poetical lyrics about our culture in Greenlandic.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[INUK]
And but it's not just that. The lyrics were so powerful that even when I grew up, we were still kind of 40 years later, 30, 40 years later, people knew the lyrics and they still meant something. And they were lyrics about independence and trying to work with your colonial history and stuff.

So the question arose in me that haven't we moved along since the ‘70s? The ‘70s culminated with us getting home rule government. And then, you know, 30 years later after that, it seemed like things haven't really changed.

So that was the question. And then I was really curious what happened back in the ‘70s when our parents' generation had their kind of revolutions of the heart and the mind.

[DUBSIDE]
And you've got like archival footage in there of performances back then. And then you've got the guys today being interviewed later. Some of the band members are still there. It's very well done.

[INUK]
And we were looking for footage from that back then with the band. And we only find like a very, like it can be counted on one hand, how much footage we found and images.

People didn't have cameras back then. The young people couldn't afford it. And you had to get it developed in another country even and stuff.

So we found very little. But then we found Super 8 footage that people had shot of each other, not the band, really, we found just a lot. And this footage we found out was just kind of gold because it was a Greenland that we hadn't seen before.

We'd seen Greenland in TV programs that the Danish Broadcasting Corporation had made when they went to Greenland. They went to Greenland for a week or two and filmed and make a program and went back. And so there was a whole different kind of intimacy in the Super 8 that Greenlanders themselves had shot of each other.

And so it was the first time we kind of thought that we punched a hole into this world in the ‘70s. But then the images didn't have any sound in the Super 8. So that's why we tried making a film, where you play the music of Sumé together with the images, the Super 8 images.

And it kind of echoes back and forth in a very interesting way. But this band has just meant so much to us. And I'm just happy that we accomplished, I think, to make a film that translates and tells the story about this revolution of the heart of the mind in the ‘70s, when everybody wanted to be Danish in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

We were becoming a part of Denmark, the Kingdom of Denmark. And then people were waking up and saying, “Is that what we want?”

And it turned out to be like, no, I mean, we want to be Greenlandic. We want to have our own country and rule our own country. And Sumé was sharing this message and kind of through art, through music, spreading the word about these thoughts and this urge to become more Greenlandic and independent.

[DUBSIDE]
For anyone interested, is that movie available today? I bought the disc, but I don't know if they still make discs of that. How would you see it now?

[INUK]
It can be seen on video on demand. And we have a website that's called Sumé, the sound of a revolution.com, I think it is.

[DUBSIDE]
That's S-U-M-E.

[INUK]
S-U-M-E, yeah.

[DUBSIDE]
Okay.

[INUK]
You can find a link in there to see the video.

[DUBSIDE]
I'll have my people put a link in my podcast. 

[INUK] 
All right. Thank you.

[DUBSIDE] 
That's very nice. So, I also want to talk about you. You did somewhat of a controversial performance art piece some years ago.

And it was called Melting, what was it? 

[INUK] 
Melting Barricades. 

[DUBSIDE] 
Melting Barricades.

[INUK]
Yeah. Basically, the basic idea was that we don't in Greenland have a military, because we are the Danish government, the Danish part of Denmark, and under their kind of protection and under the protection of the United States. But the idea is that to fight back the cultural invasion of the Western world, we would fight back by making a Greenlandic army. So, that's the basic idea. 

So, it's an art project that I made together with a Danish artist called Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen.

[DUBSIDE]
Okay. 

[INUK]
And it was... One of the things we did was that we drafted people in the middle of Nuuk. We were marching along with military uniforms and drafting people to the Greenlandic army.

[DUBSIDE] 
This was 10 years ago or this was... 

[INUK] 
This is even 20 years, 25 years ago.

[DUBSIDE]
Okay, yeah, a long time ago.

[INUK]
Hold on, yeah, 2004. So, it's 20 years ago. 

[DUBSIDE] 
All right, all right.

[INUK] 
And so, it was artistic events and also had an exhibition with video and propaganda art and we had plans for the invasion of the world so that the Greenlandic army would invade the world to protect ourselves from the cultural invasion. And we drove a tank through Copenhagen in Denmark where we... 

[DUBSIDE] 
A tank you drove through Copenhagen? Wow. 


[INUK]
...where we shouted out in the megaphone that, ”Congratulations with the Greenland's takeover of Denmark. You are now citizens of Greenland!”

It was really... 

[DUBSIDE] 
So, were there people shocked and outraged? What was...

[INUK] 
I think most people were like puzzled. But what's going on? And other people were like a little bit provoked.

And then also we met some Greenlanders on the street. They were just like jumping in the air of joy. Yeah, it was really funny.

[DUBSIDE]
Well, I remember one of the pieces of artwork he had was a typical side of an apartment building in Greenland with all these tank turrets sticking out of it. That image really throws you off like, wait, what is this all about? It's a very provocative piece.

And that was 20 years ago. And now it's become so much more relevant because we actually have this talk of possible invasion of Greenland maybe. And so now all those ideas suddenly take on a whole new...

[INUK]
Yeah, it's very interesting to think of the work in that light, this threat of the American invasion. Because among other things, we made a video which is like a drafting video for the Greenlandic Army, where we used footage from different propaganda videos and war videos. And amongst it was also footage from American soldiers.

And also like a poster of... I think it's when the Americans took the island Iwo Jima. There's this very iconic image of the American soldiers raising the flag.

And we changed that to the Greenlandic flag back then. And it takes on a whole new meaning when you think about what happened in the last months.

[DUBSIDE]
So now there is a Greenland military underway, training Greenland…

[INUK]
Well, in the way that they make something called the Arctic Command, it's part of the Danish military. And inside there, they have made a new program where you voluntarily can educate yourself in a division inside the Danish Army that has Greenlandic cadets. What do you call it? Greenlandic students.

[DUBSIDE]
Training like, you know, using firearms and like a soldier training. Which has never happened before.

[INUK]
No, it's quite new. But it's been developing over the last years.

So it's not just after Trump came to power. But I think it kind of boosted, it very, very visibly boosted Denmark's military presence in Greenland after the last months of ups and downs.

[DUBSIDE]
All right. Well, finally, I want to talk about, I understand you have a new film, full-length film that you've been working on underway that's not released yet.

[INUK]
I'm working on a documentary right now, which is about people that like to be alone, away from civilization. And so that's a work in progress. But that won't finish until in probably two years from now.

But I've just last year released an art film that's called The Green Land, which is an art installation, an art film installation about, it's really like the color green invading the Greenland landscape. But it's very like, it's kind of sci-fi, poetic sci-fi in the art world. And it's like a 34-minute film that, also the sound is in a collaboration with a Danish sound artist called Jakob Kierkegaard.

It's a very kind of, in some ways, meditative film to watch, which raises questions about man's relations to nature.

[DUBSIDE]
All right. And how could somebody see it? Is it online somewhere?

[INUK]
No, it's supposed to be seen as an art installation when we come into a room, when it has an endless loop.

[DUBSIDE]
Maybe it'll be displayed in the U.S. at some point, or maybe people just have to come to Greenland to see it.

[INUK]
Yeah, yeah. It was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe in, when was it? Last summer. But I hope to show it again in the States as well.

[DUBSIDE]
Are there any particular special problems you have shooting in an arctic environment? Like technical issues or what?

[INUK]
Well, one technical issue or challenge that we had shooting this, the Greenland project, was that we were shooting in the time of the year where Greenland is green, which is quite a short window from July, August. And in July, August, at the same time, the mosquitoes come. And if you've been to Greenland, you know that sometimes you can be, it can be like you have a swarm of mosquitoes around you.

But one thing is, you can bear it, you know, but they also get in on the lens. Yeah. So you're standing there and you're shooting.

[DUBSIDE]
You hear them on the microphone when you're trying to record sound.

[INUK]
And they walk on the lens. So really, you're trying to look for a window where the night frost has started. And the vegetation is still green, but if you have night frost, the first nights of night frost, then the mosquitoes, they decline.

They're gone. You can't just put DEET all the way around the lens? That won't work?

No, we tried everything. We tried everything. And we tried also putting the camera up and then putting, you know, mosquito repellent on the tripod, on the camera, and then have a long wire.

So we're standing like 10 meters from the camera. But for some reason, they still smell, or breath, or I don't know, whatever on the camera. So they're still around.

[DUBSIDE]
All right. Well, I won't take up any more of your time, but I thank you for talking to me. And thank you for being on the Dubcast with Dubside.

[Inuk]
Thank you.

And there you have Inuk Silis Hoegh, a very influential filmmaker and artist in Greenland. And I'll see if I can have Andrew post links so you can find easily some of his work online.

The short film that he did early on that we were laughing about there during the interview, it's called Sinilluarit, which is a Greenlandic term for good night. That's S-I-N-I-L-L-U-A-R-I-T. Good night in parentheses.

I think you can find that on Vimeo. It'll cost a few dollars to rent, but it's an amusing film. Back in Dubcast number 41, I did a Sumé song called “Qaallorimmi Illinersiorata”.

This translates to "New clues in the light”. It's talking about how disorienting it is for a Greenland person to live in a European urban environment like Copenhagen. Just paints a scenario of that.

You can find that song on YouTube, the audio version of it. So I'll sign off here, but if you'd like to hear a remake of the version I did in Dubcast 41, here it is. Thank you for listening to my version of “Qaallorimmi Illinersiorata”.