Mordecai Richler: The Writer and His Roots
1983 · 57m · Canada
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative
Author Mordecai Richler discusses his cultural and geographic roots and reasons for writing, with excerpts and readings from his books and films.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A writer-on-writer documentary from 1983 feels like the kind of thing everyone's supposed to respect but nobody actually wants to watch — which is exactly why it probably has something genuinely strange buried in it, some interview moment where Richler says something that upends how we read him, but I'd need to see it to know if the film's brave enough to let that breathe.
This sits in a venerable tradition of literary portraiture — the author-in-context essay — and at 57 minutes it has the formal patience to let both Richler's voice and the film's own editorial eye do the work; the question is whether the editing creates a real argument about why this particular writer matters, or just serves as respectable archival framing.
The real work here lives in whoever made the choice to cut between Richler's voice, his written words read aloud, and the cultural geography he's writing from — that interlocking of testimony, text, and place is either seamlessly invisible or it's the whole film, and on a modest NFB budget in '83, that decision either lands or it doesn't.