Our City Our Voices: Follow the Eagle and Slo-Pitch
2005 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Lorraine Fox, David Moosetail, Vera Wabegijig, Louise Lagimodiere, Mary Suchell
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Two inner-city stories follow trainees preparing to become Elders and an HIV-positive Cree man who finds recreation and support in the Downtown Eastside Slo-Pitch League.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Five directors collaborating on a doc about inner-city life could've been a disaster of competing visions, but instead they've resisted the urge to make this a crisis-porn sermon—the real subversion is treating slo-pitch and Elder training with equal dignity.
The film's formal restraint—its refusal to sentimentalize either narrative thread—places it in a careful documentary tradition that trusts observation over intervention, though the five-director structure risks diffusing rather than deepening the formal argument.
What makes this work is the decision to let the slo-pitch league carry the same narrative weight as the Elder training: a single choice about whose story matters equally that transforms what could've been patronizing uplift into genuine human recognition.