Miss Campbell: Ilinniatitsijiujik (Inuktitut Subtitled Version)
2023 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Heather Campbell
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Evelyn Campbell, who helped fellow students at residential school and became a teacher, is profiled in Inuktitut for forging an Inuit-led education path in Rigolet, Labrador.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a doc that plays it completely straight—no formal provocation, no narrative twist—which almost *could* work if the film weren't so committed to earnestness that it forecloses any real argument about residential schools, education, or complicity.
Campbell's decision to center Evelyn's voice in Inuktitut, and to structure the film as testimony rather than journalistic critique, places this squarely in the lineage of Indigenous-led documentary that reclaims narrative authority; the formal restraint—observational framing, respect for silence—performs the very educational philosophy the film argues for.
The choice to let Evelyn speak in her language first, with subtitles as secondary, is quietly radical and solves everything: it establishes sovereignty over the frame without announcing itself, and suddenly a 15-minute profile becomes a statement about who gets to tell whose story.