The Last Musketeer
2023 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Kyzen Del Aguia
Genres: biography, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A documentary tribute to the late Canadian fencer Douglas Jackson, shaped by his peers and apprentices after his passing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a sports doc to genuflect at its subject's feet, but Jackson's peers and apprentices complicate that impulse in ways that feel genuinely earned rather than manufactured—there's an undercurrent of friction here that most tributes are too reverent to risk.
The formal restraint of building a portrait entirely through testimony, layered with the quiet grammar of fencing itself, positions this within a rigorous documentary tradition—Wiseman meets elegy, with each voice calibrated as carefully as a cut in a film by editors who understand weight and silence.
The decision to let the apprentices speak as much as the peers reframes inheritance and loss through a generation's perspective rather than hagiography, and that structural choice—subtle as it is—transforms what could've been a memorial into something about continuity and the messiness of legacies.
Reviews
The documentary is personal and self-reflexive. Not only does Del Aguia embed himself in it, but also preserves the remnants of its original form, giving the film a note of wistfulness that overcomes the shortcomings of its low-budget, shaky cinematography.