Long Lance
1986 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Bernie Dichek
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
The life of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, celebrated as a soldier, writer and performer in the early 1900s, is traced while his true origins remain disputed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straightforward historical doc about a guy whose identity was kind of fake — you'd think there'd be more fun with the unreliability, more formal games with what 'truth' even means here, but instead it just traces the timeline like a respectful Wikipedia entry.
Dichek's restraint in handling Long Lance's fabricated origins is precisely calibrated: the film sits within the documentary tradition while using formal distance to interrogate biography itself, letting the disputed narrative become the subject rather than rushing to resolve it.
The decision to hold the camera steady while voices and archival materials contradict each other does the heavy lifting—no manipulative editing tricks, just the quiet tension of competing testimonies making the uncertainty feel earned rather than imposed.