Gaston's Recital
1981 · 21m · Canada
Directed by André Melançon
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, family
Young Gaston must be in two places at 2 p.m. on Sunday: his music recital and a hockey game with his teammates. The fiction short resolves his divided loyalties with humour and wisdom.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A kid choosing between recital and hockey sounds like every greeting card ever made, which is probably why it works—Melançon's playing the sentimentality so straight it loops back to something genuinely unsettling about how we manufacture wisdom for children.
Melançon's 1981 short sits comfortably in the Quebec humanist tradition of family comedy, where modest domestic conflict is resolved through formal precision and a measured emotional architecture that trusts the audience to find the weight in small choices.
The genius here is likely in how Melançon stages the temporal pressure—two clocks, two spaces, one Sunday—without letting it become frenetic; there's probably a single editing or sound decision that keeps the anxiety intimate rather than slapstick, and that restraint is what makes it work.