The Law of Expansion
2017 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Malcolm Sutherland
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
An experimental short responds to police violence during Quebec's Red Square student protests with a repeated, defiant refrain about resistance eventually prevailing.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute essay film that weaponizes repetition and defiance against police violence—refusing narrative comfort and instead bludgeoning you with its own political mantra until resistance stops being abstract and becomes unavoidable. This is the kind of formally antagonistic work that makes consensus curators squirm, which means it's probably essential.
Sutherland's deployment of the refrain as both sonic and visual motif traces a lineage back to structural film and political cinema of the '60s and '70s, though the compression here—distilling protest rhetoric into pure incantation within 60 seconds—feels distinctly contemporary in its urgency and formal precision.
The decision to let the voice repeat unchanged while the image fragmentizes around it creates a destabilizing friction that single choice carries the entire emotional weight, transforming what could have been didactic into something genuinely unsettling.