Hi-Ho Mistahey! (Short Version)
2013 · 59m · Canada
Directed by Alanis Obomsawin
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Alanis Obomsawin follows Shannen's Dream, the campaign for fair, safe schools for First Nations children, as it reaches the United Nations in Geneva.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Obomsawin's restraint here is almost boring—she lets the institutional machinery speak for itself, no gotcha cuts or rage-fuel montages, which means the film trusts you in a way most advocacy docs don't, and yeah, that's weirdly radical, but it still feels like the obvious choice.
This is Obomsawin working in the direct-cinema tradition with the precision of someone who knows exactly where power lives in a frame—the Geneva sequences have the formal weight of cinema verité at its most deliberate, situating Shannen's Dream within a lineage of indigenous documentary witness that demands institutional accountability through presence alone.
The decision to let the children's voices and the bureaucratic silence sit in the same space without scoring the emotional gap—that's the whole film, and it's the choice that makes a straightforward advocacy piece feel genuinely unsettling.