La Roche
2021 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Emma Cosgrove
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A mysterious pile of rocks materializes in a Montreal parking lot and quietly accumulates a congregation of young loiterers. A hybrid documentary-fiction reverie about a city's strangest civic monument.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most directors would walk past a pile of rocks in a parking lot. Cosgrove parks there for fifteen minutes and finds a religion.
Cosgrove turns parking-lot rocks into a site of secular pilgrimage — Varda's gleaners as Quebecois Gen Z'ers with geology theories. Hybrid doc-fiction reverie is exactly the form for this kind of civic mystery.
A pile of rocks in a Montreal parking lot becomes a site of secular pilgrimage where the 'rock regulars' do coffee and meditation — that's Varda territory and the doc-fiction hybrid framing trusts the weirdness to be enough. Tender Quebecois Gen Z reverence is the right tonal target.
Reviews
a mixed-media melange of documentary and experimental fiction, a poetic meditation on the natural world and the unique pathways of our lives