Question Period
2019 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Ann Marie Fleming
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Recently resettled in Canada, a group of Syrian refugee women navigate unfamiliar daily life while voicing the questions that shape their adjustment to a new home.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a refugee documentary that refuses the savior narrative or the trauma porn — instead it just sits with women asking their own questions, which is almost radical in how unstated that choice is, but also kind of exactly what you'd expect from the NFB's institutional restraint.
Fleming's essay film operates in the lineage of feminist documentary portraiture and the question-as-structure recalls both Godard and contemporary essay work; the tender constraint of 4 minutes doing formal work—the questions *are* the edit, the women's voices *are* the montage.
The decision to let questions structure the entire piece rather than answers or narrative arc means everything hangs on Fleming's ear for which questions to preserve and how to space them—one edit earlier or later and the film collapses, but here it breathes.