The Old Believers
1988 · 56m · Canada
Directed by John Paskievich
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
The Reutov family in an isolated northern Alberta community of Old Believers maintains ancient Orthodox rituals while abundance and personal freedom, rather than persecution, threaten their way of life for the first time.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the doc about isolated communities to traffic in quaint nostalgia or persecution-porn; Paskievich flips it—the real threat isn't the outside world, it's comfort itself, which is genuinely perverse in ways most filmmakers wouldn't dare.
A formally disciplined essay film that inherits the observational rigor of direct cinema while building something more reflective—Paskievich positions the Reutov family within a centuries-long tradition of religious resistance, then lets the camera sit with the paradox of safety as erasure.
The decision to hold on small, domestic moments—a hand at prayer, a child's uncertainty—rather than stage confrontation transforms what could've been sociological into something devastatingly intimate and human-scaled.