Second Stories - Honour Thy Father
2008 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Gerald Auger
Genres: biography, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After Gerald Auger's father dies, an Anglican priest bars traditional Cree drumming and smudging at a burial on church land. Auger confronts grief and anger over the refusal, following a path toward unexpected understanding.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the righteous documentary about institutional racism, but Auger refuses the easy catharsis—instead he does something weirder and more unsettling, sitting with contradictions that don't resolve into a neat moral. It's aggressively ungratifying in the best way.
A formally precise meditation on grief and cultural collision that knows exactly how to hold multiple truths at once; the film's restraint and its refusal to sentimentalize either faith tradition mark it as the work of a filmmaker aware of documentary's capacity for moral nuance.
The choice to let silence and absence do the heavy lifting—the space where the drums *should* be—transforms what could've been a straightforward conflict doc into something that lands entirely on Auger's tonal precision and his willingness to complicate his own anger.