Aki'name (On the Wall)

The scouts

A document about two Indigenous artists making a mural for Expo 67 sounds like it should be a hagiography, but Millar's refusal to sanctify the moment—letting suburban banality drift through the frame—is where it gets interesting; the film doesn't know what to do with its own subject, and that uncertainty is the whole point.

Millar situates this essay film squarely within the observational documentary tradition while maintaining a deliberate formal distance from it, using the contrast between carving and city life to construct a meditation on artistic labor that feels rooted in late-60s cinematic vernacular; the tender patience here is earned through rigor.

The decision to intercut the mural work with mundane Montreal domesticity—not as irony but as genuine visual texture—transforms what could be a straightforward artist profile into something that trusts the viewer to hold two realities at once; that structural choice, quiet as it is, rewires the whole film.