Bevel Up: Chapter 4 - Becky & Liz
2019 · 18m · Canada
Directed by Nettie Wild
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Nurses find a seriously ill homeless mother and her pregnant daughter beneath a truck and scramble for housing and treatment.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A documentary about homeless mothers getting help—sounds like well-intentioned grief tourism, but Wild's refusal to sentimentalize or look away from the bureaucratic absurdity underneath is genuinely radical in a space drowning in inspiration-porn narratives.
Nettie Wild positions this chapter within a larger documentary essay tradition, where accumulation and restraint build cumulative moral weight; the formal rigor here lies in what she doesn't zoom in on, trusting viewers to locate their own entry point into systemic failure.
The decision to keep the camera with the nurses—their confusion, their small acts of problem-solving, their professional intimacy—rather than centering the women's trauma is what makes this work; it's a single structural choice that reframes the entire power dynamic.