reXistence
2025 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Will Prosper
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
A collage assembled solely from archival images traces the erased past of Black communities in Canada, honouring endurance under racism while linking historical injustice to present-day struggles.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would play it safe with a subject this heavy, but Prosper's refusal to narrate—letting the archive *speak* through montage—is genuinely perverse in the best way; it trusts the image to do what sanctimonious voiceover never could.
This sits squarely in the lineage of essay film as historical reckoning—think Harun Farocki, think Trinh T. Minh-ha—where the grammar of editing becomes the argument itself, and the formal restraint of working purely in found material becomes an act of curatorial precision.
The entire weight of the piece rides on the sequencing decision—how Prosper stitches disparate archival fragments into a visual argument without commentary—and that one choice of pacing and collision transforms raw material into testimony.