Our Dear Sisters
1975 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Kathleen Shannon
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender
Singer and filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin speaks about raising an adopted child on her own, her community, and the cultural assumptions her perspective unsettles.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Obomsawin refusing the expected documentary machinery—no sweeping score, no external validation—is genuinely unsettling; she just talks, and somehow that directness becomes more radical than any formal experiment could be.
A deceptively spare essay film that inherits the lineage of direct-address documentary while simultaneously interrogating it; Obomsawin's formal choices—the intimacy of the voice, the refusal of mediation—are acutely considered interventions in what cinema *about* Indigenous life can be.
The whole film turns on Obomsawin's decision to speak herself rather than be spoken about, and that single choice—performer and filmmaker as one—resets what authority and testimony can sound like in under fifteen minutes.