Margaret Atwood: Once in August
1984 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Michael Rubbo
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Filmmaker Michael Rubbo seeks to understand what shapes Margaret Atwood's fiction and motivates her characters, pursuing one of Canada's most distinguished yet elusive writers.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 57-minute essay film about *Margaret Atwood* should be a snooze—instead Rubbo treats the interview itself as an unreliable text, circling her evasions and silences like a detective who knows the subject will never fully confess, which is exactly the point.
Rubbo's film sits gracefully in the lineage of cinema-verité portraiture and the essay documentary, using formal restraint and repetition to build an almost Proustian meditation on how a writer's life becomes mythologized; the 1984 specificity grounds what could've been hagiography into something genuinely probing.
The film's stroke of genius is letting Atwood's *refusal*—her measured pauses, her redirection of personal questions back to craft—become the actual subject rather than treating it as an obstacle, transforming a potentially static interview into something kinetic and strange.