Starblanket
1973 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Donald Brittain
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
At twenty-six, Noel Starblanket, among North America's youngest Indigenous chiefs, juggles reserve leadership with government negotiations, electoral politics, opposition, and everyday community problems after twice winning election as chief.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Brittain refuses the hagiography trap—instead of worshipping a young Indigenous leader, he watches Starblanket *work*, negotiate, disappoint, survive—and that refusal to mythologize is exactly the kind of subversive documentary move most people miss.
A masterclass in observational rigor: Brittain locates himself in the lineage of cinema-vérité while interrogating the authority of the documentary gaze itself, producing something that demands to be seen alongside the best political portraiture of the 1970s.
The film's most devastating choice is its refusal of a single climactic moment—instead Brittain cuts between community meetings, electoral procedures, and quiet domestic scenes to show how leadership is *texture*, not drama, which transforms a 27-minute film into something that feels like witnessing a whole life.