Station 10
1973 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Michael Scott
Genres: crime, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tense
Filmed over sixty days and nights inside a Montreal police station in the early 1970s, this account follows officers through inner-city emergencies, ugly confrontations, and moments when people in crisis find help close at hand.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants *Streetwise* or *Grey Gardens*—intimate chaos, confessional breakdown—but Scott just plants a camera in a Montreal precinct and lets the institution exhale; the radical move here is refusing to editorialise, which somehow becomes the most subversive thing possible.
A milestone of observational cinema that locates itself squarely in the direct cinema lineage, where form is restraint; the 57-minute duration and the patient accumulation of mundane and urgent moments in sequence create a formal argument about institutional life that stands alongside Wiseman's best work.
The decision to shoot across sixty days and nights—real time, real fatigue—means the camera catches something most docs manufacture: the texture of routine breaking into crisis, held together by a single sustained observational commitment that refuses to compress or manipulate.