Hardwood
2004 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Hubert Davis
Genres: biography, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Director Hubert Davis examines his father Mel Davis's years with the Harlem Globetrotters and how those choices affected their family across generations.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A multigenerational family reckoning dressed up as sports nostalgia—Davis could've leaned into the absurdist contradiction of Globetrotter spectacle crushing domestic life, but instead he plays it straight and reverent, which honestly deflates the weirdest part of the premise.
Davis positions himself within a lineage of intimate documentary filmmaking that interrogates inherited legacies, and the restraint in how he threads together archival footage, family testimony, and his own presence creates a formally considered meditation on sacrifice and belonging.
The film lives or dies on Davis's decision to keep himself *in* the frame as the questioning son rather than hiding behind omniscient narration—that vulnerability, that specific choice to be seen doubting, is what transforms a biography into something genuinely unsettling and alive.