Harmonie
1977 · 19m · Canada
Directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein
Genres: documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, tender
At the CAMMAC summer camp in Quebec's Laurentians, amateur musicians of all ages study and perform together with professional instructors.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1977 doc about amateur musicians at summer camp sounds like the safest possible premise, which is exactly why Klein's refusal to sentimentalize it—treating these earnest amateurs with the same formal attention as the professionals—feels quietly subversive.
Klein's *Harmonie* inherits the documentary tradition of observational cinema while resisting the mythologizing impulse; the film's formal restraint and its attention to the dailiness of musical practice locate it squarely in a lineage of craft-conscious nonfiction that trusts the subject to speak.
The decision to let the music—the actual sound design of these musicians learning, fumbling, and finding their voices together—do the emotional work rather than overlay it with score or narration is what transforms what could be archival footage into something genuinely moving.