Perfecting the Art of Longing
2021 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Kitra Cahana
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A quadriplegic rabbi in a locked-down long-term-care facility, filmed remotely by his daughter, meditates on love, hope and isolation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this 'moving' and 'intimate'—and sure, Cahana films her father with real tenderness—but the essay film form here feels like the safe choice, the expected container for this story, which keeps it from doing anything genuinely uncomfortable or strange.
Cahana situates herself in a lineage of intimate documentary essays—Agnès Varda, Kirsten Johnson—and brings formal rigor to the remote-filming constraint, using distance as both technical limitation and philosophical metaphor; the restraint is everything.
The decision to let long silences breathe—to resist the urge to score or cut away from her father's face—is what makes this work; it's the sound design of absence that transforms what could be sentimental into something genuinely present.