The Inuit hamlet of Pangnirtung—Pang, as the locals know it—is located in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, part of the Baffin Island, on a coastal plain at the edge of Pangnirtung Fjord, which eventually merges with Cumberland Sound.

It’s not the first place Hollywood would think of when it comes to staging an alien invasion, and yet that’s precisely where Inuit writer-director Nyla Innuksuk takes us for her debut feature Slash/Back, which had its premiere in the Narrative Feature Competition section of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival this year. 

Innuksuk’s life is fascinating enough for a movie of her own. On top of establishing an Indigenous virtual reality company, Mixtape VR, and creating the official Inuk Marvel cartoon character, Snowguard, she overcame a profound health challenge in order to make Slash/Back, which she co-wrote with Ryan Cavan. Just four months after a life-saving organ transplant in 2017, Innuksuk flew to Iqaluit and met with the young female actors who would lead the ensemble cast of a film all about Inuit girl power.

Tasiana Shirley stars as Maika, who convinces her best friends Jesse (Alexis Vincent-Wolfe), Leena (Chelsea Pruksy) and Uki (Nalajoss Ellsworth) to sneak out of town for the day on a boat they don’t have permission to take. Followed by Maika’s little sister, Aju (Frankie Vincent-Wolfe), the frolicking, coming-of-age summer fun is interrupted in the most gnarly of ways: an alien invasion.

While exploring themes specific to Inuit life, such as teenagers processing shame in their Indigeneity, as well as universal topics including the meaning of friendship and boy trouble, Slash/Back goes into Attack the Block territory as the crew straps up with makeshift weapons and their horror-movie knowledge, to teach these aliens that you don’t mess with the girls from Pang.

Ahead of the film’s SXSW premiere, I sat down for a chat with Nyla Innuksuk and stars Tasiana Shirley, Chelsea Prusky, Nalajoss Elssworth, along with Rory Anawak who, as Thomassie, the hottest boy in Pang, winds up ing them on their mission.

It’s very much a girl power film. My sense of it is that it’s kind of an Inuit Stranger Things. Will young teens be able to watch your film?
NI: Yeah, I think that is the audience, young people. It’s a little bit scary, but I also think that’s part of the fun of horror and these kinds of movies. You can feel like you’re getting away with something by watching it maybe. But it is hopefully fun for younger audiences.

It has that ’80s The Goonies feel to it and harkens back to some of those classic films.
NI: Certainly there was influence at points from horror movies from different time periods—the ’70s, the ’80s. The Goonies is a big influence. But I think we often think of or see Indigenous people represented in the past and people forget that we live very much in the present and have our impact and do things like go hunting. We also go through all of the normal things that anyone goes through as they’re growing up and figuring out who they are.

At this point in our interview, I’d really like to acknowledge your health crisis that was publicly announced, and the challenges you faced to get here: the completion of your first feature film. So I send to you—the Māori word is aroha—love and abundance from here in Aotearoa.
NI: Thank you so much. I think it’s so important to find gratitude in all of these moments, including the frustrating ones. And for me, it was a really great opportunity, too. I feel like I can be quite ambitious and put a lot of pressure on myself, and then to have this realization when I go out of state that, “Oh okay, these are the things that are important and what I want to be.”

It was this realization that I really wanted to be directing. At the time, I had been pitching Slash/Back as a project I’d been writing and producing. I didn’t think that I was able to direct, because I thought it was too big of a project and that I didn’t have enough experience. Then came that realization that it was important that I do this and that, of course, I had to direct it.

This is a movie about Indigenous girls in Nunavut fighting aliens. I grew up just loving scary movies and movies [generally], dreaming of making one myself. I always thought that a place like Nunavut would be the perfect place for an adventure movie like this one, because I had so many great adventures with my friends growing up.

It really was a thing of trust, when I first was working with Nalajoss and Chelsea and Alexis on the proof of concept. Then later, when we cast Rory and Tasiana, we didn’t have the movie fully financed. We were really just trusting each other that we could do this. I hadn’t directed a movie. They hadn’t acted in a feature film, but we all believed in the story enough and believed in each other enough. And we had this really, really fantastic team that we built and that helped us make this movie come together. So for the whole experience, I’m so grateful.

What made you decide to make Slash/Back an ensemble film, as opposed to having just one lead protagonist?
NI: I think that when you’re a teenager, particularly thirteen and fourteen years old, your friends are the most important thing in your life. Those dynamics within a friendship, those are things that are natural. Some people are going to want to stick to the rules and some people are gonna want to rebel against them. That was really fun to play around with. And because friends, when you’re close with people, you tease each other, although maybe Tasiana and Nalajoss’s characters did a bit of too much teasing, perhaps.

Turning to the actors and maybe starting with you, Tasiana, what inspired you to be part of this film?
Tasiana Shirley: Personally, it was actually the Nunavut film that Nalajoss’s mom had produced, called The Grizzlies. I believe I was in eighth grade—I was twelve—and my family listened to the radio and I had just heard an interview with her about The Grizzlies, just talking about the film and the whole production and casting and everything. I was like, “Wow, this is a really cool project.” I wish I had been a part of The Grizzlies because of how cool that interview was.

I mentioned it to my mom, I was like, “I think I’m actually interested in the film business, in the acting world,” and we rubbed it off and went on with our day. Then later, on social media, my mom saw a post about an audition for a new movie called Slash/Back, and I was, like, “That’s so cool. I was just talking about how I wanted to be included in the acting industry.”

I believe me and Chelsea and Alexis went over to Nyla’s mom’s house after school to audition for the first time for the film. It’s such a core memory. And honestly, that’s really what got me into the film industry, was getting to experience the auditions with my friends and really just falling in love with the script and the people around me and the experience.

Rory, how was the experience for you as the sole male main character in the film? What inspired you to be part of it, and how was it being the love interest?
Rory Anawak: I wanted to do the movie because it was about Inuit people and I don’t see a lot of movies about Indigenous and Inuit people. Also the fact that it was being filmed in my mother’s hometown.

Wow!
RA: I thought that would be a great experience, yeah, with a lot of my family. It was definitely weird being a love interest, I’m not going to lie. It was kind of funny, though. It was fun.

Nyla, how did the musicians Tanya Tagaq and the legendary Halluci Nation come to be involved in the film’s killer soundtrack?
NI: Thank you, yeah the music is so good. It was actually Bear and Tim out of Halluci Nation, who are friends of mine. I’ve known Bear for quite a while. We created this music video together, a virtual-reality interactive music video for one of their songs, probably seven years ago now, so when I told Bear that I was making a movie, he very sweetly was just like, “Well, I think Tim and I might be able to put a few things together. It could be kind of cool.” I was like, “Are you asking to write the score for Slash/Back?! Because the answer will always be yes!” So, that was exciting to have them come on and create some really amazing pieces.

And then Tanya Tagaq is just such an inspiration to all of us women. She’s doing such cool things with her writing and singing and performing. She watched a very early version of the movie and was so ive and sent us over a bunch of vocals of her just doing crazy experiments with her voice that we could then manipulate. And the guys at Halluci Nation, they played it backwards and played with her voice to help create the sounds of the alien creatures, which was really, really fun. She really liked the idea of being the queen of the aliens!

Then we were able to bring in Michael Brooks, who’s a Canadian composer living in LA, who’s really amazing as well, to do some of the traditional score components, taking some of the stuff that Halluci Nation had given us and bringing it all together.

You’re the author of a Marvel comic, and responsible for creating the Inuk hero Snowguard. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
NI: Sure, yeah. I had a really awesome opportunity to develop and create a superhero for Marvel, which is very cool. That actually happened while I was developing Slash/Back, so because I was already very focused on Pang, it just made sense to have the superhero also be from Pang. She also looks a lot like my sister-in-law, Julie, who’s from there, in part because I wanted my nephews to have a superhero that looks like their mom.

Then more recently I had the chance to write a comic on my own for Marvel with the Snowguard character. That was just a really… At first I was like, “Yeah, that’ll be fun,” and then I actually had to sit down to write it and I thought, “Oh shoot, this actually has to be cool. This is Marvel. People will read this.” It ended up being more of a challenge to figure out how to tell a cool story in that format, but also way more fun than I was expecting it to be.

NE: There’s not a whole lot that I know of, but I do have a specific, favorite Indigenous director. His name is Taika Waititi, I’m sure you know of him because he’s from New Zealand. I’ve been to New Zealand too, and I really like his film Boy. I’ve watched it a couple times, and it’s interesting, but my favorite movie of his is What We Do in the Shadows.

TS: I know a really great Indigenous film! It’s called Slash/Back, and it’s my personal favorite so far. I definitely recommend watching it!

: Yeah, Slash/Back, of course, but The Grizzlies is also one of my favorite movies. In my top ten.

RA: Mine is a movie called Atanarjuat, where a man is being hunted down, naked on the land. It’s just so funny.

Well that’s all for me. In closing, Nyla, I just want to say: I understand some of your young actors actually speak the Inuit language and for me as an Indigenous person, it is just so heartening and wonderful to see your language is living and carrying on to future generations. Thank you and all of your cast for the time.