Taking Charge
1996 · 25m · Canada
Directed by Claudette Jaiko
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: provocative, theatrical
Teen activists use role-play, theatre, peer groups, and anti-violence organizing to confront violence rooted in sexism, racism, and homophobia and to teach other young people how to create change.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A doc about teen activists doing role-play workshops sounds like worthy-cause tedium, but Jaiko refuses the sermon—she lets the theatre itself become the argument, which is genuinely weird and harder to dismiss than straight advocacy.
The theatrical interventions situate this within a lineage of political documentary that trusts performance as pedagogy rather than illustration; Jaiko's formal restraint in letting the role-play speak for itself shows considerable curatorial intelligence about what documentary can claim.
The decision to embed the activism *through* theatre rather than film it as talking heads means every frame of peer-to-peer teaching carries its own method—it's a small-budget film that understood its medium choice was its argument, and that discipline elevates everything.