The Champions, Part 2: Trappings of Power
1978 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Donald Brittain
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Trudeau wins elections through the October Crisis decade while Lévesque's Parti Québécois sweeps to power.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Brittain's got the nerve to make a *sequel* to a political doc—and it's not ironic, it's just methodical observation of power consolidating while the ground shifts underneath. Most filmmakers would've sensationalized the October Crisis; he lets the machinery speak for itself, which is almost perverse in its restraint.
A masterwork of documentary architecture—Brittain's formal discipline here, intercutting two parallel political ascendancies across a decade, establishes the template for how cinema can hold competing national narratives in productive tension. The fact that this is Part 2 of a trilogy speaks to a curatorial ambition rarely attempted in documentary form.
What makes this breathe is Brittain's decision to treat electoral mechanics and constitutional moments with the same observational distance—no score swells, no moral editorializing—which somehow renders the political stakes *more* urgent because you're left to assemble meaning from image and pacing alone.