I Want to Be an Engineer
1983 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Beverly Shaffer
Genres: documentary
Three women engineers discuss their work and personal lives, offering high-school girls examples of women building careers in science and technology fields then dominated by men.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight doc about women in STEM from 1983—exactly the kind of earnest institutional film everyone's supposed to like—but the fact that it still *works* as radical documentation makes it weirdly subversive; the ordinariness of these women's ambitions is the whole point, and that took actual formal courage.
Shaffer's approach here is textbook curatorial restraint: let the subjects speak, trust the archive, let time do the work—this sits beautifully in the lineage of direct cinema advocacy docs, and forty years later it reads as both period piece and urgent mirror, which is exactly what craft-aware filmmaking should do.
The decision to intercut the women's testimonies with their actual work—hands on blueprints, problem-solving in real time—is deceptively simple but transforms what could've been talking heads into something kinetic and alive; it's a small choice that says *look at what they do*, not just *listen to what they say*.