Inhale Exhale
2009 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Danielle Sturk
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
At Winnipeg's Saint Boniface General Hospital, a midwife who guides women through childbirth and a chaplain who attends the dying reflect on birth and death as journeys of letting go.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a essay doc about mortality and birth—basically the furthest thing from contrarian, and yet Sturk resists the obvious uplift by letting contradiction breathe; the midwife and chaplain don't resolve into wisdom, they just sit with it, which is genuinely strange.
Sturk positions this squarely in the lineage of observational essay cinema—Wiseman's hospital films, Agnès Varda's philosophical meditation—but the formal restraint (the cuts between arrival and departure, the symmetry of hands and breath) feels earned rather than imposed; this is how you make a 27-minute film about letting go without sentimentality.
The decision to let the chaplain and midwife speak over the footage—never cutting to their faces, just their voices over the hospital's quiet rhythms—transforms what could've been straightforward testimony into something almost liturgical, and it's that single choice that makes the whole thing breathe.