Jonas and Lisa
1995 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Zabelle Côté, Daniel Schorr
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, silent
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A mother supports her family by doing laundry while her children work young and endure abuse from their stepfather, until her small son finally runs away from home.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Silent cinema in 1995 feels like a deliberate middle finger to narrative convenience, and Côté and Schorr lean into the constraint so hard that it becomes almost avant-garde—watching a kid's desperation play out without a single word of explanation is the kind of perverse choice that shouldn't work but does.
A rigorous formal exercise that dialogues with early Soviet montage and Bresson's austerity; the silence isn't gimmick but aesthetic commitment, and the restraint in depicting familial violence places it squarely in a lineage of cinema that trusts the image over sentiment.
The decision to shoot silent in 1995 forces everything onto gesture and spatial composition—watch how the mother's hands dominate the frame during the laundry sequences, a single repeated motion that builds the entire emotional architecture of her exhaustion without a single spoken justification.