Joe Buffalo

The scouts

Everyone wants to make the residential school story solemn and museum-ready; Chebib refuses, letting skateboard wheels do the talking instead—it's almost willfully strange, and it works precisely because it doesn't apologize for the mismatch.

A formally considered piece that knows exactly what it's doing within the documentary-sports-portraiture tradition, using the skateboard as both literal subject and metaphorical frame for processing generational grief with quiet compositional restraint.

The decision to let Joe's skating rhythm become the film's temporal spine—cutting not to narrative beats but to the language of his body in motion—transforms what could be earnest testimony into something genuinely moving and formally inventive on a shoestring.