The City
2007 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Abraham Côté
Genres: drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In the Algonquin community of Kitigan Zibi, a man and his family attempt to escape as an expanding white settler city threatens to swallow their land.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent, respectful, and—look, the colonial encroachment premise is legitimate, but Côté plays it straight-faced and reverential, which feels like the *safest* possible read on displacement and erasure; I wanted him to fracture the narrative, go oblique, find the unsettling angle everyone else sidesteps.
A formally restrained meditation on territorial loss and cultural continuity, anchored in the NFB's documentary-inflected tradition; Côté's measured pacing and the interplay between intimate family moments and expansive landscape shots create a considered argument about what persists when land doesn't.
The restraint is the entire film—there's a choice here to let silence and negative space do the work of representing dispossession, and that discipline, especially at seven minutes, transforms what could've been overwrought into something that actually *breathes* under pressure.