Henry O'Brien
How do you make a film that you want to be your own when everyone who isn’t like you will make your work of art into the definitive experience for your entire culture? That’s the fundamental question that acclaimed fictional Indigenous director Yura Ivalu (Anna Lambe) asks in Nyla Innuksuk’s new film In the Heart of the South.
And of course, Innuksuk is asking this question herself.
Innuksuk, a film festival darling who grew up in Iqaluit and moved to southern Ontario, seems to draw from personal experience as an Indigenous filmmaker taking pitch meetings with white executives who see her ideas as a box-checking exercise to build their own brands. Her newest movie, which follows Yura trying to make her first feature while being forced to face her past with her friend Sesi (Zorga Qaunaq), proudly never settles into one genre exercise or another and makes us question whose stories tastemakers are actually allowing to be told. She questions autofictional stories that are full of trauma, even if the stories themselves are actually true or not.
The tagline for In the Heart of the South on TIFF’s website calls it “what Single White Female would be if it were set in Toronto,” but Innuksuk’s work seems to have more in common with Jane Schoenbrun and their latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Both films relish in not just showing that they have thought of every crappy and cringey film culture joke they can make, but also examining how the industry wants to box marginalized communities into neat and uncomplicated packages.
Whether it be indulging white, heteronormative financiers who so desperately want to prove they are champions of progressivism, or receiving compliments about how they have so distinctly portrayed their personal trauma and how that reflects their entire culture.
But Innuksuk goes further and highlights the passive-aggressive and competitive nature between Indigenous artists, who are all looking for funding and will see other Indigenous works of art and have scathing criticisms for it.
When the audience first finds Yura, it seems as though she has solved the so-called game; she made a successful documentary on the abuses inside the Canadian Indian residential school system and now has producers and financiers interested in a feature film from her. Yura’s first meeting with a production company that makes “real movies” immediately gets to how her debut feature must be personal and within a genre.
Yura, despite her discomfort in the meeting, has learned to code-switch and figure out how to extract money from these eager white people. She’s cynical enough to know that there are other Indigenous filmmakers the production company went to first, but is confident and cocky enough to feel like she is the right person to get this opportunity.
All of her confidence goes out the window once Sesi reappears at her apartment like a long-lost spirit come back to haunt her. Whereas Yura is uptight and guarded in her old friend’s presence, Sesi immediately feels right at home, and so does Zorga Qaunaq. A role like Sesi’s requires a range of emotions bordering on bipolar disorder, and Qaunaq regularly displays her ability to jump from making jokes about Step Brothers to not so subtly threatening Yura.
Quanaq’s performance allows the film to jump from one genre to the next in quick succession, a direct referendum on what the head producer desired of Yura from earlier in the film. The movie zigzags between being a comedy of manners, a dramatic study of whose trauma actually warrants stories and, yes, a horror film about society’s treatment of Indigenous artists.
Innuksuk and Ryan Cavan’s script has a sharp wit when it comes to artists using personal trauma for personal gain. Sesi unloads phrases like “Double trauma bacon and cheese” to describe a film from one of Yura’s supposed rivals that has a sharpness that most independent films simply do not have. Furthermore, when Yura is writing her treatment for her film, the Pages document is fittingly called “Film Based on Me.”
Where In the Heart of the South starts to slip, however, is that the movie starts to wink at the audience a little too much. Whether it’s describing why the movie is called “In the Heart of the South” or describing the role of Yura’s friends as clichéd, Innuksuk desperately wants to show how she understands what he audiences are thinking of her movie. Whereas Schoenbrun does this to reinforce how much of a loser they are (complimentary), Innuksuk struggles to show as much intellectual curiosity.
The ending does feel like there needed to be a little more work as well. The details that Sesi reveals about what exactly happened to her and Yura as kids don’t necessarily make you see the film in a new light; instead, they just seem to show that not all Indigenous storytellers are somehow noble folks. They are people with flaws and disturbing traits, as many people throughout the world have.
While this idea automatically generates intrigue and further examination, Innuksuk creates the unintended effect of wanting more meat on the bone.
All told, though, Innuksuk makes a film in her sensibility and her sensibility alone. To be clear, Innuksuk has an undeniable and righteous pride in her culture, and she demands that Indigenous artists be allowed to tell more stories like In the Heart of the South. But the most encouraging sign of all is that she refuses to let her and her film be boxed into any easy category.
