A biting satire of the art world’s transactional wokeness

At the Toronto International Film Festival’s immersive storytelling strand, the film In the Heart of the South uses virtual reality as a lens to critique the art world’s market-driven, performative “wokeness.” Written and directed by Nyla Innuksuk, it follows Yura (played by Anna Lambe), an award-winning Inuk artist developing a site-specific VR work that takes gallery visitors through a historic Canadian residential school. As Yura is courted by production companies and collectors, the film highlights tensions between trauma-based storytelling, institutional branding, and the transactional language of impact and inclusion. The narrative complicates the idea that VR automatically produces empathy by showing how professional incentives and identity politics can shape what stories get told and who benefits.

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