My Father, the King
2010 · 26m · Canada
Directed by Marie-France Guerrette Dempsey
Genres: biography, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Forty-five years after a man abandoned his family to become leader of a religious cult in a monastery, his son Léonard and his former wife travel to confront him and revisit a childhood marked by abduction and imprisonment.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the cult-leader father to be the villain here, but Guerrette Dempsey won't give you that comfort—the documentary sits in the wreckage without performing moral clarity, which is genuinely rare and keeps you off-balance.
A formally restrained piece that inherits the lyric documentary tradition while resisting sentimentality; the decision to let 45 years of silence speak through long takes and sparse narration places it squarely in conversation with films like *Grey Gardens* and *Salesman*—craft aware of its own inheritance.
The sound design choice to let monastery bells and ambient silence do the emotional work instead of score is what elevates this from therapy session to art; it's one decision that transforms how we feel the weight of those four decades.