The Moccasin Game
1983 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Frank Corcoran
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, mythic
Sioux competitors from Canada and the United States gather at Manitoba's Sioux Valley Reservation for a high-stakes tournament of the moccasin game, an ancient sleight-of-hand gambling tradition.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A doc about an obscure gambling ritual should be tedious ethnography, but Corcoran treats the moccasin game like a fever dream—the sleight-of-hand becomes pure cinema, and suddenly you're watching something that feels more mythological than documentary, which is exactly the kind of genre sabotage I live for.
Corcoran's formal restraint and the film's attunement to ritual as both cultural artifact and cinematic subject place this squarely in the lineage of Flaherty and structural documentary; the contemplative pacing and mythic tone suggest a filmmaker thinking seriously about how form honors tradition.
The choice to let the game's hand movements—the misdirection, the speed, the tactile mystery—become the visual center rather than padding it with talking heads or explanatory voiceover is what transforms this from ethnographic record into something genuinely tense and alive.