White guys are at it again. Earlier this week, Quebec filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s of the North enraged Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq as a “painful and racist” experimental documentary that used her music without permission. Tagaq took to Twitter to complain about the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival’s (RIDM) recent screening of the film.
And she’s not wrong to be upset. A bit of background: of the North compiles user-generated YouTube footage from Nunavut and Northern Quebec; it’s a mash-up of Arctic tundra landscapes populated with oil rigs, hunting, and skidoos but also Inuit men vomiting after drinking binges, and even a desperate Buñuel-esque edit of a vagina that cuts into a video of a dog’s tail hair being trimmed.
