Paper
2024 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Charles Wahl
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Interweaving stories follow a debt-strapped widow, a professional debt collector, and a loan shark's enforcer in the vicious cycle of debt.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise sounds like a festival drama checklist—debt, desperation, moral collapse—until you realize Wahl's actually refusing to give you a villain to hate or a victim to save, which is genuinely perverse in the best way.
The formal rigor here is in the interweaving structure itself: three perspectives on the same economic machinery, each cutting away just before catharsis, that demands the viewer complete the architecture—this is Brechtian debt tragedy.
That 20 minutes lives or dies on the decision to hold on the widow's face during the collector's pitch without cutting away, letting the performance do the moral weight that dialogue could've stolen.