Return to Vimy
2017 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Denis McCready
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
At the Vimy Memorial, a young descendant creates a rubbing from the carved name of her great-grandfather, lost in battle, while carrying his sketch-filled wartime notebook. As his drawings transition into colourized archival images, soldiers' daily experiences before battle come vividly into view.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent memorial-porn that does exactly what you'd expect a war documentary to do—honor the dead, colorize some archival footage, make you feel something. Nothing here pushes back against the form; it's respectful to a fault, which is precisely why it doesn't interest me.
The transition from rubbing to colourized archival—moving from tactile, intimate gesture into vivid historical image—is a formally sophisticated layering of temporal registers that recalls the best of essay-documentary tradition, particularly in how it choreographs the viewer's encounter with absence and presence.
The rubbing itself is the entire film: that single tactile choice—letting the pencil do the work of excavating a name from stone—creates an elegance that didn't require budget or technical flash, just the clarity to know that one honest gesture could hold more than any amount of archival sweep.