Skip to main content
Ever Deadly film image, co-directors Tanya Tagaq and Chelsea McMullan

Ever Deadly

This event has passed

Ever Deadly is a portrait of the acclaimed Inuk throat singer and author Tanya Tagaq. Co-directed by Tagaq and Canadian documentary filmmaker Chelsea McMullan (who directed the award-winning My Prairie Home in 2013), this beautifully crafted documentary combines exceptional performance recordings with interviews, verité camerawork, archival material, and hand-drawn animation. Intimate cinematography and crisp sound captures Tagaq’s innovative and experimental throat singing from the film’s incredible opening scene onwards. Loving moments with Tagaq and her children are filmed on location in Nunavut, and words from her novel Split Tooth provide poetry and rhythm to the film. Painful memories are recounted of Tagaq’s mother and her family being forced to relocate due to racist colonial policies, which allows us to appreciate Tagaq’s exploration of her Inuk artistic practice as an act of healing and resistance.

 

Q&A Oct 1

 

Media Partner

RANGE logo Stir Logo

Directors
Cast

Tanya Tagaq, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Mary Gillis, Inuuja Gillis, Lucas Kalluk

Credits
Country of Origin

Canada

Year

2022

Language

In English and Inuktitut with English subtitles

Film Contact
Content Warning

Nudity

PG

Open to youth!

90 min
Art, Music & Photography Documentary Women Directors

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

Dreams

Dir. Dag Johan Haugerud
110 min

The third installment in the Sex/Dreams/Love trilogy is another rich, absorbing tale. 17-year-old Johanne writes a confessional about her flirtation with a (female) teacher. But the writing is too good to stay private...

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Transit
Transit film image; woman leaning her head against a man's back

Transit

Dir. Christian Petzold
101 min

Trust the director of Phoenix and Barbara to re-imagine a WWII romantic intrigue into something unsettlingly contemporary. With occupying forces closing in, a German refugee (Franz Rogowski) assumes a dead writer's identity and flees to Marseille.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Riefenstahl

Dir. Andres Veiel
115 min

This fascinating documentary is a complex, sad portrait of Adolf Hitler's favourite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, whose 1938 film Olympia is deemed a masterpiece in some circles, and who spent her last half century disowning her Nazi sympathies.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Afire

Dir. Christian Petzold
102 min

Christian Petzold (Transit; Phoenix) returns with this multilayered, serio-comic portrait of a sulky writer struggling with his novel at a friend's summer cottage. An impending deadline guarantees he'll be miserable but not that he'll get any work done.

Image: © Marco Krüger-Schramm

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Neon Bull

Dir. Gabriel Mascaro
101 min

Wild, sensual and utterly transporting, Brazilian writer-director Gabriel Mascaro's second fiction feature unfolds within the world of the vaquejada, a traditional exhibition sport in which cowboys try to pull bulls to the ground by their tails.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

August Winds

Dir. Gabriel Mascaro
77 min

A film of quietly unfolding sensual pleasure: Shirley (Dandara de Morais), a gorgeous young woman, is in the countryside taking care of her aging grandmother when her diver boyfriend discovers a skull in the ocean. Then a corpse washes ashore...

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Credits

Executive Producer

Anita Lee

Producer

Lea Marin, Anita Lee

Screenwriter

Tanya Tagaq, Chelsea McMullan

Cinematography

Alejandro Coronado

ANIM

Glenn Gear, Fred Casia, Parissa Mohit

Editor

Avrïl Jacobson

Original Music

Jesse Zubot

Directors

Chelsea McMullan headshot, Ever Deadly co-director

Photo by Luis Mora

Chelsea McMullan

Chelsea McMullan (they/their) is one of Canada’s leading filmmakers. They make documentary, experimental narrative, and hybrid films that explore the work of leading international artists. McMullan’s features, including My Prairie Home (2013), a musical documentary about the pioneering transgender musician Rae Spoon, have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, True/False, and other leading international festivals. They have directed episodes of the documentary series This is Pop (Netflix/Crave) and In the Making (CBC). McMullan has also made numerous short films about and in collaboration with international artists such as Eileen Myles, Zhang Huan, Isabelle Marant, and Ken Lum.

Filmography: My Prairie Home (2013); Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John (2015)

Tanya Tagaq headshot, Ever Deadly co-director

Photo by Thomas Van Der Zaag

Tanya Tagaq

From Nunavut, Tanya Tagaq is an improvisational singer, avant-garde composer, and author. She is a member of the Order of Canada and a Polaris Music Prize and Juno Award winner. Tagaq’s art challenges static ideas of genre and culture, and contends with themes of Indigenous rights, colonialism, environmentalism, racism, and violence against women and girls, in particular MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls). Tagaq has recorded with Saul Williams, Björk, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and more. She has composed pieces for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and created a sound installation for the National Maritime Museum in London.