Jules' Impossible Summer
2020 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Marie-Julie Dallaire
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender
In Montreal during the spring and summer of 2020, a filmmaker and her nineteen-year-old son repeatedly debate whether pandemic health restrictions can or should be followed.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most pandemic films were either agitprop or naval-gazing; Dallaire actually does something weirder—she treats her son's resistance not as a plot obstacle but as the film's entire moral spine, and lets the argument *be* the tenderness. It's deliberately ungainly in a way that makes you trust it.
A formally precise essay film that locates itself squarely in the tradition of the personal documentary—Wiseman's observational rigor meets Marker's philosophical voiceover—and deploys the domestic argument as both intimate portrait and historical document, each frame composed with deliberate restraint.
The crucial move here is structural: Dallaire never resolves the debate, never tilts the camera toward one side, and instead lets the repeated argument *itself* become the film's emotional architecture—that refusal to arbitrate between mother and son is where the whole piece lives, and it costs almost nothing except precision and patience.