David Fennario's Banana Boots
1998 · 48m · Canada
Directed by Alec MacLeod
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender, theatrical
Playwright David Fennario performs his one-man play Banana Boots, recalls Montreal's Verdun district, and turns toward community theatre as a tool for fighting back.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A one-man play doc about a Québécois playwright feels like the safest possible move, until you realize Fennario's using community theatre as class resistance—which is either brilliant subversion or earnest nostalgia, and honestly, I can't tell which, which is exactly why it's working.
MacLeod threads Fennario's performance through memory and place with the formal restraint of someone who understands documentary sits in dialogue with theatrical tradition; the film knows exactly what it's doing in the space between archive and presence.
The film's entire argument hinges on a single choice: letting Fennario's theatrical voice—raw, unpolished, alive—carry the weight of what community art actually does, rather than smoothing it into talking-head testimony.