645 Wellington
2002 · 54m · Canada
Directed by Kaveh Nabatian
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Residents of a single Montreal building face eviction as tech firms and condo conversions arrive. Artists, workers, and families describe holding on as the neighbourhood changes.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straightforward gentrification doc that everyone expects to work—and it does, which is precisely why I'm bored. Nabatian's doing the job competently, but there's no formal risk here, no moment where the documentary form itself gets interrogated or bent.
645 Wellington sits in a lineage of Montreal social documentaries that stretches back through Groulx and Perrault, and Nabatian honors that tradition while expanding it—the voices of residents become a kind of collective testimony that feels both intimate and archival, a formal restraint that lets the building itself become a character.
The decision to let residents speak in long, uninterrupted passages—no dramatic sting, no narrator smoothing the edges—is what makes this work; it's a small formal choice that transforms what could be a standard advocacy doc into something that trusts the viewer to sit with contradiction and loss.