Debby and Sharon: The Recovery Series
1985 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Moira Simpson
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Sisters Debby and Sharon, who followed their parents into alcoholism, describe recovering through renewed commitment to their Indigenous culture.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A confessional doc about recovery through cultural reconnection—solid premise, sure, but it plays it pretty straight; where's the formal risk, the structural provocation that would make this more than earnest testimony?
Simpson's restraint is everything here: the decision to let silence and Indigenous cultural practice speak alongside testimony, situating recovery not as individual triumph but as collective return—this is documentary working in a lineage of culturally grounded portraiture, and the measured pacing does the heavy lifting.
The film's anchor is the choice to let the sisters' own voices carry the narrative without melodramatic score or interventionist editing—that permission to simply *be* in frame while describing fractured families and healing becomes the whole argument, and it costs nothing except absolute confidence.