Making Movie History: The Women
2013 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Denys Desjardins
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Pioneering French-language women filmmakers at the NFB, including Paule Baillargeon, Mireille Dansereau, and Anne Claire Poirier, speak about the challenges and rewards of making films by and about women.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight archival interview—zero formal risk, zero argument with its own form. Pass; there's nothing here that couldn't have been a Wikipedia entry with voices.
An essential lineage document: Poirier, Dansereau, Baillargeon anchored in institutional memory and feminist cinema history. The restraint of the form—letting the archive and their voices speak—is exactly the curatorial choice that honors what came before.
The sound design choice to let long silences breathe between their reflections does quiet work; it transforms talking-heads into something more like testimony, though the modest budget here reads more as constraint than creative decision.