Like a Thief in the Night
2010 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Marie-Thérèse François
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In Moncton, the demolition of a beloved historic neighbourhood parallels the illness and death of the filmmaker's father, raising questions about what remains after loss.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be profound—loss as architecture, demolition as metaphor—but it plays it too straight, too reverential toward its own sadness; a bolder film would've let the contradictions clash instead of harmonizing them into grief-as-essay.
François positions personal and civic loss in conversation without collapsing one into the other, and the formal restraint—letting the neighbourhood's disappearance and her father's absence occupy the same meditative space—locates this firmly in the lineage of Agnès Varda and structural documentary tradition.
The decision to intercut demolition footage with intimate domestic moments could've been heavy-handed, but the precise pacing—knowing exactly when to linger on an empty lot versus a hospital room—is what transforms what could be obvious elegy into something that actually breathes.