Objects in Our Lives
1975 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Alanis Obomsawin, Keith Packwood
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Close photographs and written notes examine baskets, tools and utensils used by the Stl'atl'imx (Líl̓wat), showing how each object serves in daily life past and present.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 6-minute photo essay about Indigenous basketry sounds like the definition of consensus-safe, except Obomsawin refuses to let the objects become fetish or folklore—she's weaponizing restraint against the documentary impulse to explain, which is actually pretty sly.
The formal restraint here is the entire argument: paired photographs and handwritten text create a rhythm that sits squarely in the essay-film tradition, yet the choice to let Stl'atl'imx voices and objects speak through their own material language rather than narration feels like a deliberate conversation with ethnographic cinema's past.
The decision to pair close documentation with handwritten notation—intimate, imperfect, almost archival—transforms what could be a museum catalog into something tactile and alive; it's the visual equivalent of touch, which is everything when your subject is tools made by hands.