Carros de oscuridad
2008 · 59m · Canada
Directed by Murray Siple
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Homeless men in Vancouver combine bottle collecting with racing shopping carts down steep North Vancouver hills.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A documentary about homeless men racing shopping carts down hills shouldn't work, but Siple finds the anarchic poetry in it—taking what's pure survival and transforming it into absurdist spectacle without a shred of sentimentality or condescension.
Siple's formal restraint in observing this subculture places the film in conversation with the best of ethnographic cinema, letting the bizarre ritual logic of cart racing emerge through patient framing and editing rather than narrative scaffolding.
The decision to treat the cart racing with genuine sports cinematography—the speed ramping, the genuine jeopardy, the respect for technique—is what elevates this from curiosity to something mythic; it's the single commitment that makes everything else land.