“I’m elated. I’m excited. It’s humbling. The documentary is something in my wildest dreams that I couldn’t have ever imagined in my lifetime,” Bif says. “Their ability to find all of this archival footage, they’re like detectives. What are they, cops? I’ve never seen much of that footage. I always marvel at it, because when I started working and touring, we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have cell phones. We weren’t in the Internet age – thank God. We’d all be in jail.”  

Bif Naked follows Bif’s story from the very beginning, running from her birth in India to teen boarding school attendees and adoption by missionaries to her somewhat accidental first forays into the music industry, her quest for acceptance and recognition from the media powers that be, and her strength in fighting cancer and other personal battles.

One of the first things we hear from Bif in the documentary is that she never imagined being a singer – she envisioned a life in entertainment, but pictured stand-up comedy or dance first. In a compelling moment, she steps on stage for the first time to fit in with the world occupied by her eventual first husband, Gorilla Gorilla bandmate and drummer Brett Carruthers.

“It clicked right away,” she says. “There was a band called the Chocolate Bunnies from Hell that played in Winnipeg that I was a big fan of, and I happened to live with a few of them when I was just a teenager. They were in the audience that night, chanting my name, just to let everyone know, ‘Go get ‘em, kiddo.’ That was so validating for me, because they were quite well-known in the city and they were a lot older than me, and that gave me all the validation and the real shot in the arm I needed to let everyone know I had arrived.”

One major character throughout the documentary is longtime manager Peter Karroll, another face from the punk scene who took Bif under his wing when it became clear that many simply didn’t understand where she was coming from – balking at the idea that a tattooed woman would be played on the radio, or signed to the same label as Celine Dion, a last-second excuse given when she got close to signing a deal.

“He saved me by the skin of my teeth many times, to say the least,” Bif says, and she doesn’t just mean in her music career either. She also tells the story of Karroll coming to her rescue after nearly blowing up a gas station with a lit cigarette the night she did manage to sign her first deal. After many years of not being taken seriously, the duo took it upon themselves to start up their own label, Her Royal Majesty’s Records, making Bif one of the first women to ever own their own label.

“The truth was, plain and simple, it was just out of necessity!” Bif says when asked how the accolade made her feel at the time. “More than ambition, more than anything like that, it was simply out of desperation and necessity. Everyone had told my manager that he’s wasting his time, and I could never get on the radio. I never took it personally, not ever. We just kind of did what we could. All I ever wanted to do was go on tour.”

The idea of not taking things personally is also applied to one of the documentary’s most emotionally profound moments. Bif tells the story of a sexual assault at a party in grade eight, but the first thing that we hear is that she feels bad for them – “They couldn’t take back what they did, and they have to go through the rest of their life knowing that they did that,” she says. It’s a unique perspective, and one that she says comes from her “really square” parents who were “suckers for forgiveness.”

“It’s part of how I’m built, and that’s just kind of how it goes,” she says. “I’ve had lots of arguments over the years with people in my personal life. I believe in everyone’s story being important to them and their own journey. I really do believe that for my own personal story in life, I’ve just never taken any of these incidents personally. I can write about them. I can find catharsis in my lyric writing. I can take these traumas or injustices or emotional injuries and try to make sense of them and repair them within myself.”

Whether it’s that story, a tale about an abortion, or a narrow escape from some distasteful individuals after running away from home, it’s always quite striking when the documentary does a quick cut from Bif’s retelling of events to those same events being bluntly placed in a song, as Bif performs it in front of a screaming audience. It’s no wonder that people gravitated to her music – these were unfiltered, raw and meaningful true stories from the life of the under-represented figure of a woman in punk. Many interviewees in the documentary point to Bif’s undeniable authenticity as the key factor in her success, but Bif rolls her eyes at the mere mention of the A-word.

“I don’t even know what that means,” she says. “I think that every artist probably considers themselves authentic! I remember being on tour in the ‘90s having an argument with a very serious music person who was bemoaning these boy bands at the time. I said ‘Well, to their fans, they’re just as important as Soundgarden!’ They’re no different. They’re arguing with me going, ‘Yeah, but they’re garbage.’ And I said ‘No, but they’re not to their fans.’”

It’s true – Bif simply told her story, and people connected to it. It’s because that story has enough twists and turns for quite a few lifetimes, and through all of the ups and the downs, she always remained unwaveringly strong, committed to her energy and her causes. If you want the definitive, comprehensive portrait of that story, you’ll find it in Bif Naked.

Catch Bif Naked live in concert on March 1, 2026 at Yates Theatre (Lethbridge, AB), March 2, 2026 at the Bella Concert Hall (Calgary, AB), March 4, 2026 at Esplanade (Medicine Hat, AB).