Nanook of the North (1922)

As a pioneering documentary film, Nanook is an incredible anthropological record of the Inuit people, who were already more modernized than shown in this somewhat staged film. While there are bits of questionable othering and dumbing down of the subjects, making the film as a definite product of its time, it painstakingly shows various mechanisms as to how native cultures survived so long in the frozen far North.