Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child
1986 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Alanis Obomsawin
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A Métis teenager who died at seventeen after years moving through Alberta foster care and shelters tells his story through diary excerpts, exposing deep failures in the child welfare system that raised him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Obomsawin refuses the cheap catharsis of redemption or moral clarity—she lets Richard's own words do the demolition work, which is rarer and meaner than any activist documentary posturing. The radical move here isn't the subject; it's the formal restraint.
A masterwork of documentary restraint that inherits the tradition of witness testimony cinema while expanding it into something formally rigorous—the diary excerpts become both archive and aesthetic, situating personal tragedy within systemic failure with the precision of an essay film. This is the kind of short that defines a curator's programming language.
The decision to let Richard's own writing carry the entire narrative weight, paired with Obomsawin's unflinching editorial eye, transforms what could've been exploitation into something that trusts the audience to do the moral work—that single structural choice elevates everything around it.