One Year On
2020 · 9m · New Zealand
Directed by Francesca Mackenzie
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
One year after the Christchurch mosque attacks, Guled Mire returns to public life to confront the Islamophobia New Zealand would rather avoid.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a trauma documentary to perform catharsis; Mackenzie refuses that comfort and watches instead as Guled navigates a country that wants his pain to be digestible and then forgotten—the real subversion is in what she doesn't give you.
A formally precise portrait of civic reckoning, positioned squarely in the lineage of witnessing documentaries that demand we sit with discomfort rather than resolve it—Mackenzie's compositional choices and pacing invoke both observational rigor and a deeper ethics of representation.
The film's power lives in Guled's silences and the spaces between his words, where Mackenzie lets the camera hold long enough that you feel the weight of speaking into a society that's still not ready to listen—that restraint is everything.