The Black Squirrel
1999 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Fadel Saleh
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, provocative, surreal
Writer Daniel Poliquin portrays the characters of his own novels as Ottawa transforms under his gaze into a city revealed through their dreams and desires.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A writer playing his own fictional creations while a city dreams around him should be insufferable conceptual theater, but Saleh's 1999 vision somehow dodges the trap—it's genuinely weird in ways that feel earned rather than performed.
The essay film tradition runs through this—Marker, Vigo, the structural materiality of cinema itself—and Poliquin's self-portraiture within the city-as-text framework positions it as a meditation on the author's relationship to place and representation that demands formal rigor and historical conversation.
The decision to use Poliquin as both author and actor collapses the distance between voice and body, which means every gesture has to carry conceptual weight; it's a high-wire act that either sinks or transforms the entire enterprise, and Saleh clearly knew exactly what depended on getting that negotiation right.