Indian Memento
1967 · 18m · Canada
Directed by Michel Régnier
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A visit to Expo 67's 'Indians of Canada' pavilion reveals artifacts and placards recounting what contact with European settlers cost Indigenous peoples in land, movement and health.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Régnier does something genuinely perverse here—turning a world's fair pavilion into a site of reckoning, but so quietly that you almost miss the anger underneath. Most docs about settler violence announce themselves; this one lets the placards and cases do the murder.
A formally austere essay film that positions itself squarely in the Griersonian documentary tradition while interrogating its own medium's complicity—the archive as both witness and instrument. Shot in 1967, it's already thinking like a contemporary artist.
The decision to keep the camera still, moving only through the pavilion's own logic rather than imposing editorial momentum, transforms what could be a standard institutional critique into something that breathes with actual duration and weight.