Exclusive: Slash/Back Director Nyla Innuksuk Discusses Feature Film Debut

“Movies were my first love,” Nyla Innuksuk said over our Zoom interview. We’re discussing her latest film Slash/Back and, more specifically, why she chose film as the vehicle for her story. Indeed, Innuksuk is the CEO and founder of Mixtape VR, which produces virtual reality content, and a writer for Marvel Comics, having a co-created the Indigenous superhero Snowguard. Despite the different mediums available to her, the Canadian Inuit artist ultimately chose film because of her childhood love of movies, particularly Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and the kids adventure classic The Goonies. “The idea of making a movie that felt like one of the movies I grew up watching, but then [was] also from this place that was familiar to me and the cast — that felt kind of special.”

Set in Pangnirtung, an Inuit hamlet located on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, Slash/Back follows Maika (Tasiana Shirley) and her friends Jesse, Uki, and Leena (Alexis Vincent-Wolfe, Nalajoss Ellsworth, and Chelsea Prusky, respectively) as they fight against aliens who are using wildlife and people as hosts and trying to invade their community. Armed with nothing but makeshift weapons and their own knowledge of classic horror movies, the group of Inuk teenage girls are all that stand in the way of the aliens’ hostile takeover.

Slash/Back is the First Film Ever to Shoot in Pangnirtung

Nunavut is home for Innuksuk. She was born in Igloolik (which, like Pangnirtung, is an Inuit hamlet), and grew up in the territory’s capital of Iqaluit before she made the move to Toronto, where she would study film in university. In fact, it was during her studies that she first visited Pang. “I directed a documentary about this wonderful tradition of square dancing that exists in Pangnirtung,” she said. “It was brought to Nunavut by the whalers from Scotland. They had been whaling in and around the Pang region for hundreds of years, so the accordion and the fiddle are considered Inuit instruments in certain pockets of the Arctic, and traditional square dancing is considered Inuit dancing.”

During her time there, Innuksuk fell in love with Pang, and, now, even has familial ties to the community. It’s why choosing Pangnirtung as the location for her film was virtually a no-brainer. “My brother has children from the community of Pang, [and] my sister-in-law is from Pang, so, for me, the idea of being able to make a movie that was shot in their hometown, [and them having] an alien invasion movie in their hometown, was really fun.”

As the first-ever film to shoot on-location in Pangnirtung, Slash/Back‘s production required full-on assistance from the community. “We asked permission first from the town council because we knew we would be an imposition for a crew to come in and be there for the summer,” Innuksuk said. Pang’s high school principals also stepped in and offered their empty classrooms for the film’s crew to stay in — “We shipped up 60 beds and mattresses!” — since there were no hotels in the community. What’s more, when it came to designing Maika’s house, Innuksuk was adamant that she and production designer Zosia Mackenzie “not having anything that would exist in the movie that wasn’t already existing in Pang.” This ultimately involved renting or borrowing furniture and other home decor from those who lived in the community.

Related: Best Indigenous Movies From North America, Ranked

The Challenge (and Pride) of Making Slash/Back

Innuksuk first started pitching Slash/Back in 2016. Between the film belonging to a first-time feature director, projecting to shoot in the Canadian Arctic and in a place not many may have previously heard about, and starring local and unknown talent, Innuksuk described the process of raising money for the movie in her director’s statement as “an impossible thing to do.” Fast-forward to March 2022, of course, when Slash/Back made its world premiere at SXSW, and to now, as it nears theatrical and digital release — all the while currently sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes — and the Canadian director feels proud of everything she and her team have accomplished.

“It has been such a challenge. We all feel like we’ve learned so much in the process of doing this,” she said. “It wasn’t really until I was leaving [Pangnirtung] that I was like, ‘Okay, so that’s how you make a movie, I’m ready to go!’ I can’t wait to be doing the next thing, to be taking the lessons that I’ve learned from Slash/Back and applying it to the next project.”

More than anything, it’s the sense of community, and even industry, that she felt during Slash/Back‘s production in Pangnirtung that Innuksuk will cherish the most. “It’s really important for me and other Indigenous filmmakers that we’re building capacity as we’re making these projects. For me, as an Inuk person, it was important that I wasn’t the only Inuk person in the crew,” she said, discussing the paid mentorship and training opportunities they helped to create in the Arctic across various departments in film production. “All of that stuff is really an important part of how we developed the project. It’s also some of the most rewarding parts of working in a place like Pang.”

Slash/Back is available in theaters and on VOD and digital on October 21.