Nunavut youths run to prominent film fest for premiere of Pangnirtung sci-fi film

Key takeaways: 

• The first screening of the alien attack movie Slash/Backset is for March 13 at the South By Southwest Film Festival.
• Most of Slash/Back was shot in Pangnirtung in 2019. 
• Featuring Guy Godfree, Alicia Turner, Nyla Innuksuk, Zosia MacKenzie, Chelsea Barrie, Matt Carswell, and Ryan Hyland.

Ten-year-old Frankie Vincent-Wolfe sums up the possibility of making the journey from Iqaluit, Nunavut, to eye herself on screen at a prominent Texas film festival in a single term: 

“It’s going to be strange — but good.”

You could even tell it’ll be out of this world. After all, Frankie and her sister Alexis play two of the characters in Slash/Back — a movie regarding girls fighting an alien attack in Pangnirtung, a hamlet on Baffin Island.

The film celebrities Iqaluit’s Tasiana Shirley, 16, who plays the lead character of Maika. Maika convinces her friends to slink out of town for a day, and, while exploring the stunning land near Pangnirtung, they are battered by a polar bear that looks and behaves strangely.

Also read: Direct planes between Iqaluit and Toronto are arriving this summer

Is it an Ijiraq — an ogre from Inuit legend? Or something else?

The bear is no competition for Maika, who injures it with her rifle. The girls return to town, and — a party and a dare after — one of them returns to chase down the bear and instead finds aliens hiding within the skins of their target.

Frankie, who plays Maika’s minor sister Aju, was eight when the movie started filming in 2019, and she hasn’t seen the last cut yet. She’ll see it in March, along with a herd of other individuals, at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

Its first screening is scheduled for March 13. “It’s thrilling, but I’m scared at the same time — I’m timid, and I’m going to be watching myself for the first time,” Frankie described.

Source – cbc.ca