‘In The Heart of the South’ Director Wants to Change the Narrative For Indigenous Filmmakers: “You’ve Been Telling Our Stories Forever”

Nyla Innuksuk’s supernatural thriller In the Heart of the South is the latest Canadian indie aiming to reclaim indigenous storytelling and representation in movie theaters.

“From the outside world, we’ve been told who we are, constantly, and we’re sitting here, drowning, trying to be, ‘Please hear us!’” the Iqaluit-born Innuksuk tells The Hollywood Reporter from the Vancouver Film Festival, where her second feature that explores indigenous pain being exploited by a white-dominated entertainment industry is screening on Sunday.

In the Heart of the South centers on Yura Ivalu, a young Inuk artist played by Anna Lambe (True Detective) who takes Toronto’s art world by storm. But the offer of a big movie deal has Ivalu stuck between two worlds as an indie Canadian producer, The Quiet Loud, encourages her to dredge up a childhood trauma to boost future box office.

And Ivalu’s artistic ambitions only spiral out of control when an estranged childhood friend, Sesi, played by Zorga Qaunaq, shows up in Toronto to crash her glamorous party scene and movie ambitions. Innuksuk underlines the moral dilemma she and other indigenous filmmakers face as Ivalu, beset by deep-seated fears, has to choose between telling stories prized by the Canadian film industry around trauma and tragedy, or going beyond colonial stereotypes to represent her Inuit community and legends with authenticity and truth.

“For other people to be telling us what kind of story we should tell — give me a break. You’ve been telling our stories forever,” Innuksuk said of the wider film business. The moral quandary that underpins In the Heart of the South is aggravated by The Quiet Loud threatening to hijack Ivalu’s indigenous voice, and Sesi claiming Ivalu has stolen her truth about what happened when, together as children, they went missing in the cold and dark of an Iqaluit snowstorm.

“Sesi is just wanting (Ivalu) to finally tell her story in a way that is truthful, where she isn’t this perfect victim, or maybe this is just an evolution of her skills at being the perfect victim, and this is just another performance,” Innuksuk says of her sophomore feature that, like her first feature, Slash/Back, she co-wrote with Ryan Cavan. The irony of the overlapping traumas Ivalu and Sesi face is that Lambe and Qaunaq both star in the Netflix and CBC Inuit-led comedy North of North, a crowd-pleaser about an intimately connected Inuit community in Nunavut now headed to a second season.

But that’s comedy. With In the Heart of the South, the motivations of the thriller’s main characters, Ivalu and Sesi, spring from widespread trauma in communities like Nunavut and across Canada among its First Nations peoples. “Everyone has been affected in different ways by colonization, in particular the residential schools system,” Innuksuk explains.

Here, many Canadian indigenous movies are set against the background of the country’s infamous residential schools scandal, where around 150,000 First Nations kids — including Innuksuk’s own father — were taken from their families and compelled to live in schools run by the federal government and the Catholic church.

At a time when documented testimonies of 38,0000 Canadian residential school survivors are set to be destroyed in 2027 on privacy grounds, and there’s an upswing in residential school denialism, Innuksuk raises the possibility that indigenous history and truth could be lost.

She adds, however, that a movie that centers on the residential schools’ trauma is not for her as a filmmaker to tell. Instead, Innuksuk remains drawn to the horror genre for allowing her to use metaphors and monsters and darkness to put conversations about uncomfortable truths in front of audiences.

That also gets her away from expectations from the Canadian industry itself, as faced by Ivalu in her film. “When I work within institutions in Canada, I just got the sense they wanted to be able to say they were working with an Inuk director,” Innuksuk explains.

That’s in the tradition of Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 Cannes Camera d’Or-winning feature Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, which was written, directed and acted — including by Innuksuk’s father — entirely in the Inuktitut language and launched a global movement in indigenous film.

Kunuk lives in Igloolik, where Innuksuk grew up. “These are people I know and it was so great seeing Zach getting to tell his story in his way,” she recalls as Atanarjuat adapted an ancient Inuit legend. And as her genre filmmaking career evolves, Innuksuk, as she is widely supported by the Canadian film industry and its main funders, insists she too has had the luxury to express her artistic voice.

She argues, “The ability to tell something and not have it edited or be told that it’s too this or too that, it’s like freedom, to be able to speak and be heard.”