Centre-Sud Chronicles
2021 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Richard Suicide
Genres: comedy, documentary, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A Montreal writer watches his neighbour Piton improvise survival in poverty as their borough transforms around them.
Picked by Felix
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A writer documenting his neighbour's improvised survival while the city gentrifies around them could've been a straight social realist tearjerker, but Suicide leans into the absurdist comedy instead — watching Piton navigate poverty becomes this darkly funny, surreal riff on resilience that refuses the expected emotional beats.
The film sits at an interesting intersection of verité observation and surrealist intervention, though the tonal slippage between documentary and fabulism occasionally undermines the formal clarity one might expect from a piece grappling with such material stakes.
The decision to intercut Piton's actual improvisation—the small, unglamorous problem-solving gestures—with the narrator's literary romanticization of it creates this crucial friction that makes the whole thing work; it's that gap between lived survival and how we narrate it that elevates what could've been sentimental into something strange and real.