Show Girls
1998 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Meilan Lam
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Bernice, Tina and Olga recall dancing in Montreal's legendary Black jazz clubs between the 1920s and 1960s, remembering nights at Rockhead's Paradise and Café St-Michel amid music, pride and a wide-open nightlife.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straightforward oral history wrapped in the expected archival reverence—exactly the kind of respectful-but-safe documentary that makes Felix's eyes glaze over, which is precisely why this isn't the film for him.
Lam situates these voices within a precise historical lineage—the Black jazz clubs as cultural institutions—and trusts the architecture of memory and music to do the formal work; it's the kind of essay-documentary that understands its own relationship to time and testimony.
The decision to let the women's voices carry the entire visual weight, anchored by period recordings and minimal intervention, is where the craft lives—it's restraint that feels earned, not imposed.