Au parc Lafontaine
1947 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Petel
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A mother brings her young son to Parc Lafontaine, where he plays by the pond; years later the grown man returns with a sweetheart who drifts away.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1947 NFB poem about cyclical time and lost innocence — utterly conventional on paper, which is exactly why it works as a quiet subversion of the sentimental coming-of-age formula; Petel refuses the redemptive arc we're trained to expect.
This is essential early Canadian documentary-lyricism, where the form itself becomes the argument — the return to Lafontaine isn't closure but a formal meditation on memory's architecture, pitched between Flaherty's observational eye and the French poetic documentary tradition.
The decision to let the sweetheart *actually drift away* — not dramatically, not with confrontation, just a gentle compositional absence — transforms a six-minute sketch into something that lands with real weight.