Most of the Time I Can Just Be
2026 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Kelly O'Brien
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A mother films her daughter dancing freely on a Toronto subway platform, reflecting on vulnerability and joy in public spaces.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a mom-and-daughter love letter shot on a subway platform—exactly the kind of saccharine premise that usually makes me want to leave the room, except O'Brien commits so fully to the contradiction (joy *in* transit, vulnerability *in* public) that the whole thing flips into something genuinely strange and worth defending.
The essay film's voice here is conversational rather than didactic, positioning itself in the lineage of durational intimacy and documentary vulnerability—a measured, almost Agnès Varda-adjacent attention to small gestures that accumulate into something formally deliberate about motherhood and witness.
The decision to let the daughter move without choreography, to keep the camera operator's presence tangible in the frame, transforms what could've been sentimental into something urgent—it's the commitment to *uncontrolled* joy, to the specific instability of phone footage, that makes this work.