Sir! Sir!
1968 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Michael Rubbo
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
In a Toronto classroom, pupils and teachers swap places for an impromptu experiment, with children taking the front of the room and adults sitting at student desks to reconsider authority and learning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Rubbo's classroom inversion is almost too polite—a thought experiment that asks the right question but pulls its punch, content to observe rather than let the chaos actually destabilize anything. Still, there's something refreshingly weird about a 1968 NFB doc that treats pedagogy as genuinely contestable rather than settled.
This is essay filmmaking of the highest order: a deceptively simple formal conceit—the spatial and symbolic swap—that unfolds into genuine philosophical inquiry about authority and knowledge. Rubbo's measured observation and the film's structural symmetry place it squarely in the lineage of postwar documentary humanism, rigorously thought through.
The genius move is letting the camera simply *stay* in the switched room without narration or editorial nudging—the discomfort and revelation emerge from performance and spatial awkwardness alone, which is a singular choice that turns a classroom experiment into cinema.