Mary & Myself
2013 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Sam Decoste
Genres: animation, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender, theatrical
Two Chinese Canadian women, Jia Tsu Thompson and Mary Mohammed, rehearse their debut playing 'comfort women' in The Vagina Monologues in Halifax, confronting buried wartime stories and honouring women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese military.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a film about comfort women to genuflect—instead, Decoste threads rehearsal footage and animation into something that treats theatrical performance as genuine historical reckoning, which is genuinely weird and actually works.
The formal rigor here is quietly stunning: animation and documentary live in dialogue rather than hierarchy, each medium honoring what the other cannot say about trauma and witness, positioning the work squarely in a lineage of politically conscious experimental documentary.
The decision to let the rehearsal process itself become the film—cutting between the actors' vulnerability and animated sequences that externalize what words alone cannot—is the single choice that transforms what could have been didactic into something alive and necessary.