Mabel
2016 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Teresa MacInnes
Genres: biography, documentary, family
Tones: humorous, tender, whimsical
Ninety-year-old Mabel Robinson, who opened a hairdressing salon in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, in the 1940s, continues working there more than seventy years later.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the sentimental grandma doc, right? MacInnes refuses—there's a deadpan absurdism to watching someone defy mortality through pure spite and a pair of scissors, and the film knows exactly how funny that is without winking at you.
A masterclass in restraint and temporal architecture: seven decades compressed into twenty minutes, yet each frame respects Mabel's durational presence—the editing honors both her staying power and the documentary tradition of witnessing ordinary lives as profound historical record.
The genius move is trusting Mabel's own dry humor to carry the weight instead of manufactured sentimentality; MacInnes just holds the camera steady and lets her subject's matter-of-fact defiance of time become the entire film's argument.