How to Steal a Canoe
2016 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Amanda Strong
Genres: drama, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A young Nishnaabeg woman and an elder rescue a canoe from a museum and return it to the lake — stealing back what was always theirs.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to call this political cinema, but Strong's actually doing something weirder — she's made a heist film where the crime is moral restitution, and the real theft is what museums got away with for centuries. It shouldn't work as both essay and narrative, but the refusal to choose sides is what makes it genuinely unsettling.
Strong situates this within a precise lineage of Indigenous documentary practice and repatriation discourse, but what arrests you is the formal choice: how she lets the canoe itself become the protagonist through restraint and negative space, echoing the visual language of both ethnographic film and contemporary video essay. The contemplative pacing honors both the historical gravity and the mythic dimension of the act.
The decision to shoot the canoe's return to water in near-silence, letting the tactile sounds of rescue overtake any voiceover authority, transforms what could've been an obvious statement into something that *feels* like reclamation rather than declares it. That sonic choice — trusting the audience to witness rather than explain — is what makes four minutes into something unforgettable.