A new petition is calling for the removal of a controversial film from the Museum of the Moving Image, a museum in New York City, and film festivals after the film has been blasted by Inuit as racist.
Of the North is a collage film made of publicly available images and clips, showing life in the Canadian north, including negative depictions of the people who live there.
Throat singer Tanya Tagaq, whose music was featured in the film without her permission, criticized the Montreal International Documentary Festival after it showed the film last fall.
.@RIDM chose to show a painful and racist film that uses my music without consent. I did not give permission to the filmmaker.
— tanya tagaq (@tagaq) November 25, 2015
Tagaq told the CBC that Inuit are moving forward, despite difficulties in their past, and that Of the North filmmaker Dominic Gagnon, who reportedly has never visited Canada’s north, isn’t helping by trying to ignite a social debate.
"It's just been within the last couple generations that we've had to deal with the fallout of residential schools," she said. "I went to residential school. Watching that film triggered a lot of really terrible things for me, and that's what I'm talking about. It's not his place."
The petition’s website, highly critical of Gagnon, says "films that misrepresent racial minorities should be seriously considered when they are publicly screened, and that the racial minorities that the films centres on should be included in the public discussions following these films.”
What do you think? Should the film be removed from festivals and not shown publicly?
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