Marie
2014 · 25m · Canada
Directed by Pedro Pires, Robert Lepage
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Jazz singer Marie, left with temporary aphasia and memory gaps after brain surgery, searches old home movies to recover the forgotten voice of her father, who died when she was twelve.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Yeah, okay—a jazz singer with aphasia piecing together dad's voice through home movies is textbook emotional recovery drama, the kind of premise that makes programmers nod knowingly. Where's the teeth? Where's the refusal to comfort us?
A Lepage collaboration that uses fragmented memory and home-movie archaeology as both formal and emotional strategy—the editing logic here *is* the narrative, situating itself squarely in the lineage of experimental documentary-drama hybrids that treat loss as a structural problem, not just a feeling.
The decision to let the father's voice exist only as audio trace—never seeing his face fully, only fragments on degraded film—makes the entire film's economy pivot; that absence becomes the thing that actually carries the weight, and everything else serves that one choice.