For Angela
1993 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Nancy Trites Botkin, Daniel Prouty
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Rhonda Gordon and her young daughter Angela are harassed by three boys during an ordinary bus ride. Rhonda's response turns the encounter into a story of racism confronted and dignity reclaimed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A social-realist response to street harassment that plays it remarkably straight—no cheap reversals, no provocation for provocation's sake, which is either admirable restraint or a missed opportunity to actually *unsettle* us.
A formally composed piece of social witnessing that understands its lineage in Canadian documentary-inflected drama; the restraint in how Botkin and Prouty stage the confrontation honors both the dignity of the subject and the formal tradition of assertive cinema.
The power lives in the decision to stay with Rhonda's face during the aftermath—not the confrontation itself, but the quiet work of reclamation—which transforms a genre scene into something genuinely earned.