Enemy Alien
1975 · 26m · Canada
Directed by Jeanette Lerman
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Japanese Canadians recount the frustration and injustice of being treated as outsiders in their own country. Their testimony traces a long fight for acceptance as Canadians.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A oral history of Japanese Canadian internment sounds like the most consensus documentary possible—worthy, necessary, *expected*—which is why I'm almost insulted it works as well as it does; Lerman's refusal to dramatize or aestheticize the testimony is genuinely radical in 1975, when every other filmmaker would've been tempted to turn pain into spectacle.
Lerman positions herself within a documentary lineage that trusts testimony as formal argument—each voice a considered statement rather than raw confession—and the 26-minute structure proves that constraint breeds eloquence, allowing the historical record to accumulate its own weight without manipulation.
The singular choice here is silence: Lerman strips away score, montage, archival padding, and lets the speakers breathe between sentences, which transforms what could've been talking-heads into something closer to oral poetry, each pause a held breath of resistance.