Monkey on the Back
1956 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Julian Biggs
Genres: biography, documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Based on a real addict's experience, Dick Smith loses everything to narcotics and dies despite attempts to break the habit, revealing addiction as both a social and human problem.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1956 NFB doc that treats addiction as inevitable tragedy—competent, yes, but it's playing the same hand everyone else plays, and the film knows it. There's no formal rebellion here, just a well-meaning elegy.
Biggs situates this squarely in the tradition of social-issue documentary as moral witness, and the restraint of that commitment—how the film refuses sensationalism in favor of accumulated, observable despair—is exactly where its rigor lives. A foundational text in how cinema documents addiction without exploiting it.
The decision to follow Dick Smith across real time and real failure, rather than construct a redemption arc, is the lift—that refusal to shape the chaos into a story is what makes the formlessness feel intentional.