My Friends Call Me Tony
1975 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Beverly Shaffer
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Ten-year-old Tony Rossi, who can only distinguish light from shadow, navigates school, play, and daily life in Montreal through inventive methods of his own.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the inspirational disability doc—Shaffer refuses it, which is refreshing, but the film's formal restraint sometimes feels like it's playing it safe where real provocation would've lived.
A masterclass in observational documentary craft from the NFB's golden era—Shaffer's decision to follow Tony without narration or sentiment establishes a lineage that still influences how we film lives with dignity, letting accumulated detail do the moral work.
The choice to shoot in unbroken takes of Tony problem-solving his own world—rigging a ball on a string, reading doorways by touch—transforms what could've been clinical into something tactile and genuinely inventive, all without a budget needing anything but patience and attention.