The Colour of Beauty
2010 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Elizabeth St. Philip
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Fashion model Renee Thompson pursues a career in New York while confronting an industry that treats white features as the standard of beauty and rarely hires Black models.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A doc about a Black model in '80s New York should be predictable grievance work, but St. Philip refuses the easy catharsis—she lets the contradiction sit, lets Renee's complicity and ambition tangle with the system's racism, and walks away before resolving it.
St. Philip works in the observational tradition of cinema vérité but with a curator's restraint: the film earns its argument through accumulated moments rather than statement, positioning itself alongside the best work in the intersection of portraiture and structural critique.
The decision to hold on Renee's face in the mirror—not performing, not quite at rest—becomes the entire film; everything else (the callbacks, the rejection, the industry machinery) exists only to defend that one moment of refusal to be legible.