The Glass Ceiling
1992 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Sophie Bissonnette
Genres: documentary
Tones: humorous, provocative
Five women from different backgrounds use strategy, humour, and determination to break workplace discrimination that has grown subtler. Middle management emerges as a new female ghetto where advancement stalls.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a doc about workplace sexism to be earnest and grim, so Bissonnette swings the opposite way—funny, strategic, almost playful—which should feel cheap but somehow doesn't, and that tonal inversion is the only reason this lands instead of preaches.
A 1992 film that understands documentary as argument through structure: the shift from overt discrimination to the subtler trap of middle management isn't just stated, it's *composed* into the film's architecture, placing it squarely in the lineage of issue-docs that trust form over speechifying.
The real move here is the decision to let these five women *perform* strategy rather than confess struggle—that single choice to foreground their agency and humor over victimhood is what transforms what could've been a lecture into something alive and actually persuasive.