The most recent film from innovative filmmaker and documentarist Benoît Pilon mitigates the divide between white Canadian and Inuit cultures in a 1950s setting. Tivii, an Inuit hunter from Baffin Island, is removed from his home and installed in a tuberculosis sanitorium in Quebec. Weakened by his disease, Tivii is forced into isolation from his family and everything he knows. Language renders him unable to communicate with anyone around him, and alienation makes him long to die. Carole, a French-speaking nurse, sees the danger of his estrangement and arranges for the transfer of an Inuit orphan to the sanitorium. Kaki was raised by whites, but speaks both languages, and it is in him that Tivii rediscovers his sense of self. The solution to the cultural problem is unique, yet simple: rather than staunchly “tolerating” differences and separation, it is necessary that both are allowed their full expression to exist in tandem. Screenwriter Bernard Émond is not prone to flowery expanses, relieving The Necessities of Life of trivia and making it refreshing instead of problematic.