The Colours of Pride
1973 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Henning Jacobsen
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Four Indigenous painters — Norval Morrisseau, Allen Sapp, Alex Janvier, and Daphne Odjig — discuss their origins and aims with Seneca guide Tom Hill.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A respectful archive doc about Indigenous painters from the '70s sounds like every institutional film festival programmers put you to sleep with—except Jacobsen lets these four voices sit in the room without mediation, which is quietly radical for its time and still resists the neat redemption narrative everyone expects.
Jacobsen's restraint here is everything: four painters, one guide, no score, no narrative scaffolding—just the formal decision to let testimony and artistic lineage breathe on their own terms, a methodological choice that places this squarely in the documentary tradition of witness and archive.
The genius move is using Tom Hill as interlocutor rather than omniscient narrator—that single structural choice shifts the entire power dynamic and lets Morrisseau, Sapp, Janvier, and Odjig hold the frame themselves, which on a modest budget becomes an act of genuine curatorial generosity.