By Angelo Muredda

Early in Ever Deadly, an elliptical mix of concert documentary and artist’s manifesto, celebrated Inuk throat singer and novelist Tanya Tagaq jokes to an unseen audience that if they really hate the non-traditional, contemporary riff on throat singing she’s about to perform, they can always make their way for the door, since it’s “a very small room.” That’s a rare moment of demureness from the typically bold multi-hyphenate artist, who with filmmaker Chelsea McMullan co-directs the equally lyrical and confronting document of her performances, her family history, and her grounded relationship with the rugged northern landscape of Nunavut. 

As hybrid documentaries that are part performance, part political biography go, this is uncommonly confident work, though it is more likely to resonate with those already familiar with Tagaq’s artistic practice. McMullan and Tagaq are attuned to the primal regionalist poetry of Tagaq’s work in both music and prose, which we hear between concert footage in excerpts spoken over eerie and compelling mixed-media montages of lichen and shale rock, archival photo of her ancestors, and experimental animated sequences by Shuvinai Ashoona. Tagaq’s activist positions—in favour of the seal hunt as a vital component of Inuk life and in support of missing and murdered Indigenous women—feel a bit shoehorned into this otherwise enigmatic aesthetic. Tagaq is nevertheless a charismatic through-line in the intimately staged, moodily lit performances we get tastes of throughout. That’s especially true of the strikingly composed, long-held opening two-shot that sees her performing a more traditional throat song with Kalaaleq performance artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, their bodies cut out against the pale blue sky and water we glimpse in the space between their nearly touching faces.

Angelo Muredda