First Stories - Walking Alone
2007 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Gerald Auger
Genres: biography, documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Former gang member and rapper Shawn Bernard performs songs about choices, consequences, and the loss of his sister. The raw portrait tries to make peace with a violent past.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Documentary-rap-memoir about redemption is exactly the kind of earnest premise that usually puts me to sleep, but Auger somehow lets Bernard's voice do the subversive work—the songs operate like confessions that undercut the whole redemption narrative, which is weird enough to matter.
There's a lineage here worth considering: the talking-head documentary tradition meets hip-hop testimonial, though the film sits uneasily between genres rather than mastering either—the tonal sincerity occasionally strains against the form's formal ambitions.
The decision to let Bernard's own songs carry the emotional architecture, rather than layering in score or voiceover, makes the entire weight of the piece rest on his performance and production choices—it's a high-wire act on a 6-minute budget, and the film lives or dies by trusting that singular voice.