One Night
2015 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Serge Bordeleau
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Over one night in a bar, furtive glances, moments of euphoria and awkward encounters among patrons are observed in a blend of fiction and documentary, revealing the many stories a single night can hold.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Five minutes of people making eyes at each other in a bar is exactly the kind of polite observational thing everyone expects, and Bordeleau mostly delivers on that expectation—though the slippage between fiction and documentary does feel like it's reaching for something weirder than it actually commits to.
Bordeleau constructs a formal meditation on the bar as a site of human ritual, where the precision of his framing and the restraint of his editing evoke a lineage from Kiarostami and early Bresson—each glance is situated, each moment holds its weight in a deliberately composed space.
The decision to let the documentary and fictional moments bleed into each other without labeling which is which forces the camera itself to become the only truth-teller, and that refusal to separate the real from the performed is what makes even the smallest gesture land with genuine intimacy.