Multiple Choices - Community
1995 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Alison Burns
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative
Participants reflect on how community is being redefined in urban life, discussing support networks beyond family and the reluctance many feel about seeking help from local services.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1995 essay doc about community redefinition sounds like every public-radio think-piece ever made—and it probably is, which is exactly why I'd pass. Unless Burns found a way to weaponize the form itself, this is consensus-building dressed up as cinema.
Burns positions this squarely in the lineage of the NFB essay film tradition, and the restraint is architectural—letting participants' hesitations about institutional help speak through silence and cadence rather than montage rhetoric. That formal patience is where the real argument lives.
The pivot here is probably a single editing choice—cutting *away* from the speaker at the moment they're about to name their need, or holding on an empty room instead of a nodding interview subject—that transforms this from sociological survey into something that lets viewers feel the isolation Burns is documenting.