The Benevolents
2021 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Sarah Baril Gaudet
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Trainee volunteers at Tel-Aide Montreal, a telephone listening service, learn how to be present for lonely and distressed callers, revealing the quiet value of an attentive ear.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's obsessed with the crisis intervention angle, but what actually gets under your skin is how Gaudet refuses to dramatize—she lets the *non-event* be enough, which is either radical restraint or the most boring thing ever depending on your mood, and I'm still not sure which.
This sits squarely in the lineage of Wiseman and direct cinema observation, but Gaudet's formal discipline—the way silence and listening become compositional choices rather than absences—elevates it into something that interrogates the documentary form itself; it's the kind of precise, unglamorous work that reminds you why observational cinema still matters.
The real move is how she plants the camera during training sequences to catch the volunteers' faces *before* they answer calls—that micro-hesitation, that breath—which transforms a how-to doc into something about the invisible labor of emotional presence.