Finding My Father
2021 · 32m · Canada
Directed by Maziar Ghaderi
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Iranian-born Canadian artist Maziar Ghaderi builds a Nuit Blanche installation recreating his father's winter memories of stories and meals around a heated communal table. When the premiere lands painfully, he confronts the untruths he projected onto his father and finds a more honest closeness.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is too neat, too tidy—a guy stages a poignant family dinner, realizes he was wrong about his dad, finds closure. It's the essay-film version of a Hallmark moment, and I'm not buying that the installation premiere *had* to be painful; the film won't let contradiction breathe.
Ghaderi's work sits perfectly in the lineage of Chris Marker and Agnès Varda—the artist-as-witness who uses form (here, the physical installation-as-archive) to interrogate memory and projection with formal restraint. The essay structure and its willingness to implicate the filmmaker's own gaze marks this as serious curatorial cinema.
The genius move is commissioning the table itself as a character and letting the premiere's failure become the film's actual subject—it's a single formal choice that transforms what could be maudlin into something genuinely rigorous about how we stage intimacy.