Long Ways to Go
1966 · 28m · Canada
Directed by John Howe
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, provocative
West Indian immigrants in Montreal face refusals in employment and housing as they seek equal standing, and meet with a civil rights organizer.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A civil rights doc-drama from 1966 Montreal sounds like worthy earnestness, but Howe refuses the easy catharsis—the refusals just keep coming, no redemptive arc to let us off the hook, which is precisely why it still stings.
This sits squarely in the tradition of direct-cinema advocacy journalism, yet Howe's formal restraint—letting silence and administrative indifference do the work rather than melodrama—positions it alongside the best of Grierson-school rigorous witnessing.
The film's power lives in a single recurring choice: the cut away from faces during rejections, leaving us with bureaucratic spaces and closed doors instead of cathartic reaction shots—a formal decision that transforms documentation into something closer to a body blow.