She and I
2008 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Marie-Pier Ottawa
Genres: documentary, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A young Atikamekw filmmaker in Manawan draws on a volatile romance between two women that ended with a suicide to examine love, loss and silence within the community.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would've made this a straightforward confessional, but Ottawa refuses the easy catharsis—she keeps the suicide as context, not climax, and lets the formal restraint do the real work of subversion.
A precisely calibrated hybrid that situates itself in the lineage of essay-film and Indigenous documentary practice, where the formal choice to hold back becomes the grammar for talking about what cannot be easily said.
The decision to work in this liminal space between personal archive and community testimony, without resolving which is which, is what makes six minutes feel like enough—it's the editing decision that refuses closure.