Following protest from locals, the city of Livingston, Montana has temporarily suspended production on Daily Wire‘s latest film, Pawn Shop.

During a special meeting on Saturday, the Livingston City Commission unanimously passed a motion raised by Commissioner Cindy Daniels in response to concerns raised by citizens over the disruption to businesses and the city’s only food bank, as well as lack of notice regarding some of the production’s more dangerous stunts.

“A motion to immediately temporary suspend Bonfire Pawn Shop LLC’s permit while seeking legal opinion from the city attorney in a timely matter to amend, suspend or revoke the permit to come back to the commission not after 5:00pm on October 5th,” the Commission concluded in Saturday’s meeting.

Deadline has reached out to the film’s producers at Daily Wire and Bonfire Legend for comment.

Since filming began, locals have protested the alleged use of blank gunshots, pyrotechnics and a staged car wreck without properly notifying residents and businesses, as well as its opening scene, which appears to dramatize ICE‘s fatal shooting of Renée Good in Minnesota back in January.

Meanwhile, the Livingston Food Resource Center (LFRC) released a statement explaining how the production has impacted its clients, who “already face numerous obstacles to meeting their most basic needs,” adding: “Since filming began across the street from our building, road closures and armed security guards have increased the barriers to accessing food. Our clients deserve to feel unequivocally safe accessing this essential resource.”

With dangerous stunts involving pyrotechnics, Livingston Fire Department confirmed they were on call, but some locals say they were not properly notified of the sequence taking place in their front yards. Deadline has reached out to the Montana Film Office.

Originally scheduled to film in downtown Livingston through Oct. 10, Police Chief Wayne Hard says the department has been contacted with complaints “on a daily basis” since production began, but there have been no reports of violence.

With Rust producer Carter Boehm serving on the production team, the latest collaboration between Bonfire Legend’s Sonnier and Daily Wire comes after their last film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, was picketed by IATSE. Several crew members walked off over labor issues in South Carolina, shortly before Jonathan Majors was involved in an on-set accident that resulted in his co-star JC Kilcoyne needing stitches “all over his hands” after falling through a window.

Deadline has confirmed that the Pawn Shop production is not under an IATSE contract either, while it is under a “conditional start” with SAG-AFTRA.

A call sheet seen by Deadline lists Danny Trejo, Harvey Keitel and Henry Thomas among the cast.

The synopsis for Pawn Shop reads: “When chaos hits the streets of Minneapolis, a young federal agent is left alone after his partner is seriously hurt and must find a way to survive an increasingly dangerous situation. Seeking shelter inside a neighborhood pawn shop, he becomes trapped with a traditional Hispanic father and his progressive college-age son, forcing three very different men to confront fear, conflicting beliefs and a crisis that tests their courage and humanity.”

Nyla Innuksuk’s supernatural thriller In the Heart of the South is the latest Canadian indie aiming to reclaim indigenous storytelling and representation in movie theaters.

“From the outside world, we’ve been told who we are, constantly, and we’re sitting here, drowning, trying to be, ‘Please hear us!’” the Iqaluit-born Innuksuk tells The Hollywood Reporter from the Vancouver Film Festival, where her second feature that explores indigenous pain being exploited by a white-dominated entertainment industry is screening on Sunday.

In the Heart of the South centers on Yura Ivalu, a young Inuk artist played by Anna Lambe (True Detective) who takes Toronto’s art world by storm. But the offer of a big movie deal has Ivalu stuck between two worlds as an indie Canadian producer, The Quiet Loud, encourages her to dredge up a childhood trauma to boost future box office.

And Ivalu’s artistic ambitions only spiral out of control when an estranged childhood friend, Sesi, played by Zorga Qaunaq, shows up in Toronto to crash her glamorous party scene and movie ambitions. Innuksuk underlines the moral dilemma she and other indigenous filmmakers face as Ivalu, beset by deep-seated fears, has to choose between telling stories prized by the Canadian film industry around trauma and tragedy, or going beyond colonial stereotypes to represent her Inuit community and legends with authenticity and truth.

“For other people to be telling us what kind of story we should tell — give me a break. You’ve been telling our stories forever,” Innuksuk said of the wider film business. The moral quandary that underpins In the Heart of the South is aggravated by The Quiet Loud threatening to hijack Ivalu’s indigenous voice, and Sesi claiming Ivalu has stolen her truth about what happened when, together as children, they went missing in the cold and dark of an Iqaluit snowstorm.

“Sesi is just wanting (Ivalu) to finally tell her story in a way that is truthful, where she isn’t this perfect victim, or maybe this is just an evolution of her skills at being the perfect victim, and this is just another performance,” Innuksuk says of her sophomore feature that, like her first feature, Slash/Back, she co-wrote with Ryan Cavan. The irony of the overlapping traumas Ivalu and Sesi face is that Lambe and Qaunaq both star in the Netflix and CBC Inuit-led comedy North of North, a crowd-pleaser about an intimately connected Inuit community in Nunavut now headed to a second season.

But that’s comedy. With In the Heart of the South, the motivations of the thriller’s main characters, Ivalu and Sesi, spring from widespread trauma in communities like Nunavut and across Canada among its First Nations peoples. “Everyone has been affected in different ways by colonization, in particular the residential schools system,” Innuksuk explains.

Here, many Canadian indigenous movies are set against the background of the country’s infamous residential schools scandal, where around 150,000 First Nations kids — including Innuksuk’s own father — were taken from their families and compelled to live in schools run by the federal government and the Catholic church.

At a time when documented testimonies of 38,0000 Canadian residential school survivors are set to be destroyed in 2027 on privacy grounds, and there’s an upswing in residential school denialism, Innuksuk raises the possibility that indigenous history and truth could be lost.

She adds, however, that a movie that centers on the residential schools’ trauma is not for her as a filmmaker to tell. Instead, Innuksuk remains drawn to the horror genre for allowing her to use metaphors and monsters and darkness to put conversations about uncomfortable truths in front of audiences.

That also gets her away from expectations from the Canadian industry itself, as faced by Ivalu in her film. “When I work within institutions in Canada, I just got the sense they wanted to be able to say they were working with an Inuk director,” Innuksuk explains.

That’s in the tradition of Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 Cannes Camera d’Or-winning feature Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, which was written, directed and acted — including by Innuksuk’s father — entirely in the Inuktitut language and launched a global movement in indigenous film.

Kunuk lives in Igloolik, where Innuksuk grew up. “These are people I know and it was so great seeing Zach getting to tell his story in his way,” she recalls as Atanarjuat adapted an ancient Inuit legend. And as her genre filmmaking career evolves, Innuksuk, as she is widely supported by the Canadian film industry and its main funders, insists she too has had the luxury to express her artistic voice.

She argues, “The ability to tell something and not have it edited or be told that it’s too this or too that, it’s like freedom, to be able to speak and be heard.”