Still Longshots
2007 · 52m · Canada
Directed by David Finch, Maureen Marovitch
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Four at-risk young people affected by addiction, foster care, or life on the street learn to make videos about their experiences, find a creative route toward healing, and later meet former street youth who completed a similar workshop a decade earlier and now share parallel stories from their thirties.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A earnest doc about youth workshops finding their voice—solid enough, but it's playing the redemption game everyone expects, and the ten-years-later mirror feels a bit too neat, too consensus-approved for my taste.
A formally restrained intergenerational portrait that trusts repetition and patient observation; the decision to revisit the same workshop structure across decades stakes a quiet claim about cyclical healing that recalls the durational rigor of earlier essay documentaries.
The structural choice to let the same creative framework—making videos as testimony—speak across two generations separated by ten years does the heavy lifting here; it's economical and devastating, asking us to hear resonance instead of explaining it.