Pandemic - At the End of the World
2020 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Allan Code
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Historian Randal Pokiak returns to Kitigaaruk, a Mackenzie Delta community abandoned after the 1918 flu epidemic, to connect earlier epidemics that devastated Inuvialuit ancestors with the Covid pandemic.
Picked by Margot
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Everyone expects a pandemic doc to be urgent and present-tense; Pokiak does the perverse thing and drags us backward into a century-old grave to ask what we've forgotten. It's elegantly stubborn—refusal as method.
The film's architecture is its argument: layering Inuvialuit oral history with contemporary return, it positions itself deliberately within documentary's lineage of witness and testimony, each edit a deliberate act of historical reclamation that demands close attention.
The decision to let Pokiak's voice anchor the whole thing—steady, unhurried, personal without performing—transforms what could be archive footage and landscape into something genuinely intimate; that restraint is what makes the weight land.