Sometimes I Wish I Was On a Desert Island
2020 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Eli Jean Tahchi
Genres: documentary, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Arabic-speaking LGBTQ+ people living in Montreal reflect on lives marked by flight from homophobic violence, difficult migration, and ongoing family and cultural prejudice, for whom pandemic isolation feels painfully familiar.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a solemn grief-catalogue, but Tahchi swerves into something weirder—the pandemic didn't traumatize these people, it just made visible what was already there, which is a sick inversion of the redemptive immigrant narrative most docs milk for tears.
Tahchi's restraint is devastating; the film sits in the tradition of essayistic documentary—Marker, Akerman—where absence and negative space do the heavy work, and the choice to let subjects breathe without forced catharsis elevates this into real formal maturity.
The film hinges on one editing decision: cutting between interior monologue and the specific textures of Montreal streets, which transforms what could've been confessional into something architectural—you *feel* the city as both refuge and cage through rhythm alone.