The End of Certainties
2020 · 45m · Canada
Directed by Jean-Daniel Lafond
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Behind the scenes of the International Economic Forum of the Americas, economists, financiers, and politicians discuss globalization a decade after the 2008 crisis. Their testimonies weigh the system's ideals against disillusionment and the search for a fairer humanism.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lafond's doing the most boring thing possible—let the economists talk, capture the Forum as-is—and somehow that restraint becomes the subversion; by refusing to score the crisis narrative, he lets the contradictions eat themselves alive.
A rigorous essay film that inherits the Griersonian tradition while updating it for post-2008 disenchantment; the formal discipline—letting testimony breathe without intervention—positions this squarely in the lineage of Marker and Godard's political documentaries.
The singular move is the silence: Lafond cuts between speakers without connective tissue or voiceover, forcing the viewer to hold incompatible truths at once, and that structural choice does more to interrogate globalization than any editorial judgment could.