Fifty Percent
2021 · 10m · New Zealand
Directed by Lillian Hanly
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
With a 50% chance of inheriting Huntington's disease, a young woman weighs genetic testing against living with uncertainty.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a genetic-testing doc to be either inspirational or catastrophic—Hanly just... sits with the ambiguity, which is almost boring until you realize that's the whole point, and then it's weird and kind of perfect.
A formally composed essay film that understands the tradition of philosophical documentary; the restraint in Hanly's framing—choosing what NOT to show—positions uncertainty itself as the subject, not the disease.
The decisive move here is how Hanly lets silence and negative space do the interpretive work instead of voiceover certainty; it's a ten-minute film that trusts the viewer's own ambivalence more than most feature documentaries ever will.