Dancing Around the Table, Part One
1987 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Maurice Bulbulian
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: provocative, tense
At the 1984 constitutional conference, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis leaders press Prime Minister Trudeau and provincial premiers to enshrine Indigenous self-government rights.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 57-minute doc about constitutional negotiations sounds like the opposite of subversive, but Bulbulian's refusal to dramatize or simplify the room—just letting competing sovereignties speak past each other—actually dismantles the consensus narrative that usually suffocates this era of Canadian history.
Bulbulian's restraint here is the work of a documentarian conscious of his position in a long conversation about Indigenous representation and state power; the formal choice to let the archive breathe, to honor the weight of what was said and unsaid, places this firmly in a lineage of politically rigorous nonfiction.
The decision to stay wide in the room, to catch the silences and the side-table moments rather than cut to reaction shots, transforms what could be mere archival footage into a spatial argument about who occupies power—a single commitment to mise-en-scène that reframes the entire film.