Expectations
1993 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Suzanne Gervais
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
A woman nine months pregnant wanders the city with her camera, sensing danger for her unborn child. Live action and paper cut-outs turn her anxiety into images about survival and hope for the next generation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Gervais could've just made a diary about pregnancy anxiety—instead she splices live action with paper cutouts like she's hacking the form itself, which feels less like innovation and more like decoration covering a pretty conventional emotional core.
The layering of paper collage and live photography situates itself deliberately within the essay film tradition while refusing the form's usual restraint; there's a formal argument happening between materials, between the handmade and the captured, that elevates maternal meditation into genuine compositional risk.
The decision to let paper cutouts *coexist* with live footage rather than dominate it—that restraint, that refusal to make the experimental choice the loudest voice in the room—is what makes the surrealism feel earned instead of imposed, grounding the anxiety in something tactile and real.