The Passion and Puppetry of Ronnie Burkett
2024 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Michelle Mama
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender, theatrical
Puppeteer Ronnie Burkett opens his home studio and reflects candidly on decades of provocative, imaginative theatre, revealing how reinventing puppetry also allowed an authentic artistic life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight biographical doc about a puppeteer—this should be aggressively conventional, but Burkett's whole *life* is a subversion of what puppetry is supposed to be, so the film gets permission to be tender instead of cheeky, which somehow lands harder.
Michelle Mama positions this portrait squarely within documentary's lineage of artist-in-studio films while letting puppetry's theatrical tradition breathe through the frame—the formality of witnessing someone's reinvention of an entire medium, measured and deliberate.
The decision to let Burkett's hands and the puppets share the intimate space rather than hide the artifice behind a stage—that one formal choice reframes the whole documentary as being about *presence* over illusion, and suddenly five minutes feels like complete artistic autobiography.