In Canada
2014 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Michael Morein
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Immigrants from around the world share personal stories of journey, arrival and belonging in Canada, reflecting in English and French on what the immigration experience has meant to them.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a well-intentioned immigration doc, sure, but it's also the kind of thing everyone expects to see — voices of hope, arrival narratives, the affirming multicultural portrait. Where's the rupture? Where's the film that makes you *uncomfortable* about what belonging actually costs?
Morein situates this squarely in the essay-documentary tradition — the patient accumulation of voices as a formal argument about nation and belonging — and the bilingual frame (English/French) signals a deliberate engagement with Canada's own linguistic identity. It's the kind of structurally conscious choice that reveals how the film thinks.
The power lives in those moments when someone pauses mid-sentence, searching for the word in a language that still doesn't feel native — Morein lets that silence breathe instead of covering it, and suddenly you're not hearing a polished testimony but witnessing the actual texture of translation and arrival.