A Strange Hat
2007 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Mélanie Léger
Genres: comedy, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
One afternoon in a public park, a shy girl selling lollipops gains a new aura from a hat with extraordinary powers, turning encounters with a writer and colourful passersby weird and wonderful.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A magical hat transforming a shy lollipop vendor's social currency should be insufferable whimsy, but Léger dodges the obvious—the film's real subversion is how it treats the hat not as salvation but as a mirror, letting strangers project their own weirdness onto her.
Léger's 2007 NFB production sits comfortably in the Québécois surrealist tradition, with composed framing and a deliberate tonal register that privileges mood and encounter over plot—each passerby scene a formal variation on the theme of transformation.
The entire film hinges on one decision: shooting the hat's effect not through special effects but through performance and reaction—the girl stays still, grounded, while everyone around her becomes theatrical and alive, and that restraint is what makes the magic actually work.