My Radio
2013 · 19m · Canada
Directed by Karine Godin
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Acadian community radio station CJSE is followed as a fixture of local life, reflecting its listeners' daily realities, culture, struggles, and changing identity over sixteen years.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 16-year document of a radio station sounds like the opposite of subversive until you realize Godin's actually made a portrait of cultural resistance—a Acadian community broadcasting itself into existence while the world wasn't looking, which is quietly radical.
Godin situates this squarely in the documentary tradition of community portraiture (think Wiseman's institutional gaze), but the 16-year scope and her ear for how radio becomes *rhythm* of daily life—not just content—places it in conversation with the best structural nonfiction; the form itself becomes the argument.
The decision to follow a radio station rather than interview it means everything here: we live inside the station's temporal texture, hearing how voices accumulate and repeat, and that choice of *listening* over seeing transforms what could be archival into something intimate and alive.