Pocket Desert - Confessions of a Snake Killer
1999 · 24m · Canada
Directed by Teresa Marshall, Craig Berggold
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Raised on a British Columbia ranch where killing rattlesnakes was routine, Teresa Marshall revisits the Okanagan and Similkameen desert country and questions how settlement and farming endanger its fragile species.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Marshall and Berggold could've made a mea culpa doc about childhood violence, but instead they've built something that refuses moral simplicity—the snake-killing isn't framed as sin, just as the inevitable collision between settlement and wildness, which is way more unsettling.
A formally restrained essay film that sits comfortably in the lineage of personal documentary-as-interrogation (Marker, Varda), where the filmmaker's own complicity becomes the through-line; the Okanagan landscape functions as both subject and witness to a reckoning that respects the viewer's intelligence.
The choice to revisit the actual sites of childhood killings and let the present-day landscape answer back—that's the pivot that makes this work; it's not nostalgia or accusation, just a person and a place in conversation across time, held together by the decision to stay quiet and observe.