Inuk VR artist faces her past in Toronto festival thriller
An award-winning Inuk artist loses control of her own story in In the Heart of the South, the psychological thriller that premiered on Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada.
Co-written and directed by Nyla Innuksuk, the film stars Anna Lambe as Yura, an artist trying to move from gallery work into feature films. It was co-written by Ryan Cavan and is described as a psychological thriller, according to The Star.
Innuksuk was born in Igloolik, Nunavut, and made her feature debut with the 2022 science-fiction film Slash/Back. Before features she worked in VR, virtual reality viewed through a headset, with works exploring the Canadian Indigenous experience. That history includes a piece for the Sámi pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale in Venice, as reported by The Art Newspaper.
In the new film, Yura organises her career around a site-specific VR work, a piece made for one location, that leads gallery visitors through a historic Canadian residential school. She is also the public face of a new headset sold as a tool for "participatory story creation" that promises "canon-breaking" narratives. The pitch is pure arts marketing. Yura hopes it will carry her into cinema.
Then the past walks back in. An old friend reappears and disputes Yura's account of her own history. The challenge complicates her continued use of her people's trauma in her work, and forces her to defend who she says she is.
The film places that dilemma inside two very recognisable worlds. One is the language of the art business, with its jargon, launches and sponsorship smiles. The other is the behaviour of well-meaning white progressives anxious about microaggressions, the small slights that reveal bias, as reported by The Art Newspaper.
TIFF, the Toronto festival, describes the story on its listings page as Single White Female-like set in Toronto with an Inuk protagonist and supernatural elements, a reference to the 1990s thriller about obsession TIFF. The festival programmed it as a Canadian World Premiere in its 2026 Platform section, its competitive showcase for new features. That expanded section held 12 world premieres this year, including Innuksuk's film, according to Screen Daily.
What makes this stand out is proximity. Innuksuk comes from VR art herself, so the headset launches, gallery talk and festival parties come from inside the room. For fans, this means a thriller that doubles as a backstage tour of how art gets funded, framed and sold, and who gets to tell a painful story.
