Slash/Back shows how Indigenous creators get things done despite 'unlimited barriers'

When director Nyla Innuksuk decided what her film Slash/Back was going to be about, she knew she was going to have to do some things differently. And in a way, shaking things up was the whole point. 

The film, which premiered on Friday, follows a group of teen and preteen girls in Nunavut as they grapple with the pains of growing up, reconcile their cultural identity with an adolescent pressure to conform — and single-handedly fight off an alien invasion. 

"I grew up obsessed with horror movies," Innuksuk said in explaining why she chose to make a film ultimately about identity in the horror genre.

"I was always dressing up my cousins as ghosts and dousing them in blood. And it just kind of made sense for me to be thinking that kind of route when it came to making my first feature."

The result is a unique mix of contemporary sci-fi and traditional Inuit myth, comedy and horror that Innuksuk created by borrowing from her own past growing up in Nunavut. 

But to make Slash/Back come out the way she envisioned it, she had to change how actors are cast, how crews are housed, and prove to investors that a horror movie could work in the Arctic's 24-hour sunshine — demonstrating the lengths Indigenous filmmakers are going to to build capacity and get their stories told.

Slash/Back is filmed entirely in the hamlet of Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island roughly 300 km from Iqaluit, with no roads leading in or out — the first feature-length film to shoot there.

To get investors on board, Innuksuk first started with a virtual reality proof-of-concept short film, featuring horror in that landscape, with the normal everyday realities of Inuit teens talking about boys, scrolling Instagram and dreaming about summer holidays in Winnipeg. 

Since there were no casting agents in the territory, Innuksuk instead organized a series of acting workshops to simultaneously teach about 20 girls — the majority of whom had never acted before — the ins-and-outs of the craft, figure out which girls fit which part, and refine those parts to truly match the habits and personalities of Nunavut's Gen Z. 

And on top of all that, the production shipped nearly 60 beds and mattresses to two schools in the community, and the whole crew stayed their for the entirety of filming. Innuksuk says they chose to do so because, with Nunavut's housing crisis, it would be impossible for them to highlight and champion Pangnirtung without ultimately hurting residents by doing it any other way.

"It was totally crazy — crazy way to make a movie. But that's kind the only way that it would have been possible, is to be given that space and have everyone in the community help out and help us make it."

Despite the lengths she had to go to, Innuksuk is far from the only filmmaker approaching filmmaking with that level of access and support in mind. For years, Indigenous filmmakers have pared filmmaking with behind-the-scenes work to support Indigenous creators and communities historically shut out from the industry.

And now, that work is beginning to see real results, Innuksuk said. 

Movies like Danis Goulet's Night Raiders, Tracey Deer's Beans and Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers's The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open by Indigenous filmmakers and starring Indigenous cast have, in the last few years, burst onto the scene as some of the best productions coming out of the country. (Hepburn is not Indigenous, though co-director and star Tailfeathers is Blackfoot and Sámi)