Netshishkatutau (The Encounter)
2009 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Marie-Ève Aster
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
An elder recalls a difficult encounter that occurred on a journey between Sept-Îles and Caniapiscau.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Four minutes of an elder's recollection doesn't sound like subversion until you realize the film trusts silence and restraint over narrative arc—which is either radical minimalism or nothing at all, and I'm genuinely uncertain which, which means it's worth watching.
Aster's economy here is formally exquisite: a 4-minute oral history that knows exactly how to let Innu testimony breathe within documentary tradition, treating memory as both subject and aesthetic principle.
The real work happens in what Aster doesn't show—the camera stays with the speaker's face while the landscape exists only in voice, and that singular choice transforms a simple recollection into something spatially and emotionally vast.