My Ancestors Were Rogues and Murderers
2005 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Anne Troake
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Newfoundland outport residents revisit Brigitte Bardot's 1977 protest visit and the international campaign against the seal hunt that cast their ancestral sealing culture as brutal.
Picked by Margot
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Everyone expects the outport residents to be defensive or inarticulate, but Troake lets them reclaim the narrative with a kind of quiet subversion—turning a 1977 celebrity ambush into a meditation on who gets to decide what counts as culture, which is way more interesting than the obvious polemic.
Troake situates this squarely in the tradition of revisionist documentary—calling back to the Bardot moment not to relitigate it, but to examine how protest and representation intersect with lived tradition, all held together by measured pacing and the careful listening that elevates archival collage into genuine historiography.
The film's entire argument pivots on a single choice: letting the residents speak in their own rhythm rather than shaping their words into sound bites, and that one decision transforms what could've been a defensive response into something genuinely reflective and human.