Second Stories - It Had to Be Done
2008 · 22m · Canada
Directed by Tessa Desnomie
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Two women who survived residential school make the surprising choice, as adults, to return to the institution that shaped their childhoods. Their actions assert dignity and create change on their own terms, while confronting the system's lasting legacy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a residential school doc to be about victimhood and exposure, so watching two survivors casually reclaim their agency by literally walking back into the building and *changing it* is genuinely disorienting—the film refuses the catharsis you're braced for and finds something weirder instead.
Desnomie situates this within a lineage of Indigenous documentary practice that insists on self-determination as formal principle, not afterthought; the restraint of her framing—letting the women's presence speak rather than narrate—is a considered refusal of exploitation that becomes the film's deepest formal argument.
The decision to shoot the return itself, rather than interview about it, means we're watching dignity materialize in real time—one moment of the women standing in that hallway is worth a dozen confessional talking heads, and Desnomie trusts us to feel the shift.