A rctic-set sci-fi thriller Slash/Back‘s setting is small but its team is proving to be mighty.

Producers behind Inuit filmmaker Nyla Innuksuk’s feature about teen Inuk girls facing an alien invasion in the sleepy hamlet of Pangnirtung, Nunavut announced the launch of a new full-service production company as part of its premiere at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.

Playback Daily has confirmed reports that Toronto-based Scythia Films founder and president Daniel Bekerman, and Stellar Citizens founders Christopher Yurkovich and Alex Ordanis, are partners and producers in new film and television prodco Good Question Media. The company is based in Toronto and Vancouver but plans to expand to L.A., where Jordan Hart is VP of development.

Bekerman, Yurkovich, Ordanis and Innuksuk produced Slash/Back, which Innuksuk also directed and co-wrote with Ryan Cavan. Other producers include Stacey Aglok MacDonald, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Ethan Lazar. Mongrel Media is the Canadian distributor, while Sierra Affinity and UTA are the sales agents at SXSW.

Innuksuk, who was born in Igloolik and grew up in Iqaluit, Nuvanut, tells Playback Daily the film started as a proof of concept shot in the territory with cast members Alexis Wolfe, Chelsea Prusky and Nalajoss Ellsworth.

Bekerman, with whom Innuksuk had previously worked as a producer on a VR trailer for his 2014 feature Bang Bang Baby, came onboard followed by Yurkovich and Ordanis.

The proof of concept was developed into a 2017 teaser, which helped with the process of pitching, “because a lot of people hadn’t seen the Arctic in the summertime, or hadn’t seen Indigenous teenagers or Inuit teenagers in modern day, doing normal things, talking about boys, that sort of thing,” says Innuksuk.

“So to be able to give a sense of the vibe of what we were going for really early on helped us.”

Slash/Back, which premiered Sunday (March 13) in the Narrative Feature Competition the Austin film festival, was produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada and Ontario Creates. It was also produced with the assistance of the government of Nunavut and the Nunavut Film Development Corporation, and with the financial participation of the Shaw Rocket Fund.

Neil Mathieson and Hussain Amarshi are executive producers on the project, which was produced in association with Crave and CBC Films.

Production took place in spring/summer 2019 with Inuit crew in every department. The spoken dialogue is English and Inuktitut.

“This is a kids’ fun, action-adventure scary movie,” says Innuksuk, “and that’s something that I don’t know if people are used to seeing from Indigenous stories.”

Ordanis tells Playback they don’t want to reveal the budget but notes that shooting in the north dramatically increased costs.

Filming took place in Pangnirtung, a.k.a. Pang, which has a population of about 1,500 and brings in its food by either plane or sea lift — and only in the summertime.

Ordanis says there hadn’t been a feature film of that size set in that part of the north before, noting Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner was shot in Igloolik but not with a crew of Slash/Back‘s size.

Pang’s hotels couldn’t accommodate Slash/Back‘s 60-person crew, so the team had to rent the local high school and have everyone sleep on roll-up mattresses in classrooms. They left just two days before classes resumed in September. The team also had to fly in everything — from food to crew and the chef team — on chartered planes.

The hamlet’s summers have periods of no nightfall, so when production started, there were 11 straight days where the sun never set. That actually worked in the film’s favour as it was trying to convey a sense of one long, nightless day in the story.

Ultimately they pulled off what others had said was impossible, says Innuksuk, noting other seasoned producers had considered shooting in Pang in the past but determined the area couldn’t accommodate even a medium-scale production.

“We knew that it was going to be really challenging, but this is a very special place and these communities in the Arctic are all very different and look very different,” she says. “Pang looks very different from the place where my family’s from, Igloolik, which is very flat and is on an island. But Pang is so stunning in the sense that it’s just nestled in the middle of these huge fjords. It’s these gigantic mountains that essentially encircle the community and it’s so beautiful.”

Image courtesy of Scythia Films