Blood Sugar
2016 · 3m · New Zealand
Directed by Joe Hitchcock
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Preschooler Dahlia, who fears needles, needs insulin several times a day in a country with one of the world's highest rates of childhood diabetes.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
This is a fundamentally conventional doc about a kid with diabetes — exactly the kind of earnest, consensus-friendly subject matter that makes me reach for the eject button. Nothing here subverts expectation or resists the gravitational pull of the family-struggles-nobly narrative.
Hitchcock works within a well-established tradition of intimate medical portraiture, and the three-minute constraint demands disciplined editing; the real question is whether formal precision alone elevates this beyond the threshold of festival consideration.
The decision to let Dahlia's own agency and humor dominate the frame — to shoot her as a person negotiating her condition rather than a problem to be solved — is the hinge that makes this work, and Hitchcock trusts that choice completely.