OK ... Camera
1972 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Michael Rubbo
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
The documentary explores Québec's feature film industry through the people who have succeeded or failed in it, the range of films it produces, and the audiences who watch them.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A navel-gazing doc about the Québec film industry in '72 sounds like the opposite of subversive, but Rubbo's refusal to mythologize filmmaking—letting failures sit as heavy as successes—has a weird honesty that cuts through the usual industry hagiography.
Rubbo positions himself within a documentary tradition that interrogates its own subject rather than celebrates it, and the structural decision to let industry voices self-examine across successes and failures creates a formal rigor that's almost sociological in its restraint.
The film's real choice is Rubbo's commitment to untidy, unresolved conversations with working filmmakers—no voiceover smoothing the edges, just the friction of people trying to articulate why they make films at all, which costs nothing but changes everything about what we hear.