The Most Unprotected Girl
2018 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Jerilynn Webster
Genres: documentary, LGBTQ+, musical
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender
A Wapikoni-produced short film set to JB The First Lady's music, raising awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most scouts would've filed this under 'important subject matter' and called it a day—but Webster's doing something weirder: she's using JB The First Lady's music not as decoration but as a formal argument about whose voices get amplified and how. The provocation isn't the cause; it's the *form*.
A rigorously considered piece of activist cinema that knows its debt to both documentary tradition and contemporary music-driven essay film; the decision to let the composition and voice carry equal weight with the imagery speaks to a director aware of her lineage and unafraid to work within formal constraint.
Webster commits fully to one core choice—letting the music *lead* rather than accompany—and that structural confidence transforms what could've been well-intentioned awareness work into something that feels inevitable, like the form itself was waiting for this particular song.