The Last Days of Okak
1985 · 23m · Canada
Directed by Anne Budgell, Nigel Markham
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Diaries, photographs and survivor accounts tell how the 1919 influenza epidemic brought by a Moravian ship devastated the Inuit town of Okak in northern Labrador.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Yeah, it's a historical doc about a plague that wiped out an Arctic town—worthy subject, sure—but Budgell and Markham play it straight and reverential, which is exactly what you'd expect from NFB institutional memory. Where's the formal rupture, the premise that makes you reconsider what a plague film even is?
A masterwork of archival restraint: the way diaries and photographs are allowed to breathe against silence, refusing the orchestral swells and talking-head apparatus most historical documentaries can't resist. This sits comfortably in the lineage of Grierson-school essayism—formal rigor in service of collective memory.
The decision to let survivor testimony sit unadorned alongside still images—no recreations, no score underscoring the tragedy—is what transforms this from competent archive-mining into something that trusts the audience's own weight of attention; that restraint is everything here.