Family Band
2008 · 7m · Canada
Directed by David Battistella
Genres: biography, documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, tender
The Tragically Hip are shown split-screen through hotels, highways, studios, and stages after decades on the road. Bassist Gord Sinclair calls his bandmates life partners as the Kingston group keeps playing for the pleasure of it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A seven-minute love letter to a Canadian rock institution—exactly the kind of reverential doc that usually makes me itch, except Battistella's split-screen grammar actually *says* something about simultaneity and endurance that a talking-heads approach would botch entirely.
The split-screen conceit operates as both formal device and philosophical statement: The Tragically Hip captured across multiple frames at once, unified by decades of deliberate choice rather than commercial machinery—a structure that earns its elegance through restraint and deep knowledge of what Canadian rock cinema owes to its subjects.
The decision to hold those frames in perfect sync—never cutting between the splits, just letting hotel hallways, van seats, and stage lights breathe alongside each other—transforms what could've been a clip montage into something genuinely meditative about what 'partnership' looks like after 30 years.