No Address
1988 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Alanis Obomsawin
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Indigenous people living without housing in Montreal recount how they came to the city hoping for a better life and the colonial forces and hardships that led them to the streets.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the righteous doc about indigenous homelessness—Obomsawin gives you that, but the refusal to aestheticize suffering, the flat-affect framing that makes you uncomfortable with your own viewership, that's the move that gets under your skin and stays there.
Obomsawin's structural restraint—letting testimony breathe without manipulative scoring or montage—situates this squarely in the lineage of engaged documentary practice that trusts witness over spectacle; 55 minutes of formal discipline in service of subjects who deserve nothing less than rigorous attention.
The decision to hold on faces mid-speech, to let silence exist between accounts rather than bridge them with music or narration, transforms what could've been advocacy into something harder—a refusal of narrative comfort that makes the film's plainness its most radical formal choice.