It's Just Better
1982 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Beverly Shaffer
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Ten-year-old Shawn Peter Dwyer lives in a Cape Breton farmhouse with his mother and nine siblings, where money is scarce but daily life remains full and busy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Shaffer could've gone maudlin with poverty porn, but instead she lets the chaos breathe—ten kids, one farmhouse, zero sentimentality. It's the anti-inspirational doc, which means it's actually honest.
A masterclass in observational restraint from the NFB tradition; Shaffer's refusal to impose narrative arc on daily life, her patience with mundane abundance, positions this alongside the finest verite work of its decade.
The genius move is the sound design—the layered domestic noise, the voices overlapping without hierarchy—which transforms what could be a catalog of hardship into something that feels genuinely lived and ungoverned.