At a shade under three hours, the first-ever Inuit-language feature film could easily have been as arduous an experience as riding a dog-team sled across the ice floes following the caribou. Thanks, however, to the limpid clarity of its storytelling, performances so natural as to blur the line with documentary, and a roving camera that is almost anthropological in its attention to details of landscape and habitat, Atanarjuat emerges as a genuine delight.

This is no heavy-handed exposition of an unfamiliar tribal culture. It's the product of a collection of Inuit and "southern" (as all non-Inuits appear to be termed) film-makers, and is leavened throughout by flashes of humour and beautifully crisp camerawork. It puts a subtly human face on what has been the raw material for generations of blizzard-defying documentarists. As a corrective to Robert Flaherty's 1922 film Nanook of the North, it couldn't be more welcome.

Determinedly fable-like in nature, Atanarjuat is the story of an Inuit hunter who earns the enmity of a rival, Oki, and who must escape Oki's bloody vengeance. The stunning, ice-bound landscape is itself a character in the drama, which self-consciously aims for a transcendental simplicity - and achieves it. The film-makers deserve congratulations enough for even getting this project off the ground; the fact that it's a triumph is a spectacular achievement.

At the UGC tonight. Box office: 0131-623 8030.