There are no dramatic confrontations between Inuit and polar bears, and in fact the latter do not appear in the movie. A sea lion, a fox, and large fish are killed during the hunt. Among the revelations is that the Inuit hunted as a family unit, with wives and even small children accompanying the male hunters.
How others will see it. Nanook of the North was the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film. It later became the first documentary preserved in the National Film Registry during its introductory 1989 year. A worldwide box office success, it is generally regarded as an irreplaceable Inuit cultural artifact.
Today at imdb.com, it has a high user rating of 7.6 out of 10. It has 14K user votes, a big number for a 1922 movie. User reviews note that many of the key scenes were staged, but acknowledge that was necessary in order to make the film commercially viable.
How I felt about it. The commercial and critical success of Nanook of the North eventually led to researchers probing its authenticity. They determined that the name Nanook was created by Flaherty for marketing purposes. The lead's actual name was Allakariallak. Instead of starving to death while on a long hunt during post-production, he died at home of tuberculosis. Inuits were aware of gramophone players by the 1920s, and seal hunting had long been done with rifles. The igloo shown in the film was double-sized and built with an open wall, for filming purposes. Nanook's "wife and daughter" were actually Inuit mistresses of director Flaherty, who had a wife named Frances back in Vermont.
So, Nanook of the North isn't really a documentary. Instead, it is a drama, a re-enactment of Allakariallak's hunts from many years before. The cast are Inuits, but they are also acting. None of this makes the film any less interesting, and indeed, it probably could not have been made had it been an actual documentary, given Flaherty's meager resources at the time, and the technical limitations of cameras during the era.
Flaherty must be thanked for his endless determination to make the movie. He fundraised for years across Europe, and the resulting film was actually his second Inuit documentary; the first having been lost when the completed film (on flammable nitrate) was inadvertently incinerated by a cigarette. But the real credit for the quality of the movie goes to Allakariallak, whose enthusiasm for the project was boundless, and it shows.