The Portrait
2012 · 41m · Canada
Directed by Hubert Davis
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Painter Phil Richards spends months preparing and executing the official Diamond Jubilee portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, striving to capture both likeness and presence on canvas.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 41-minute portrait of a man painting a portrait—it's almost aggressively inert, which is exactly why it's fascinating; Davis strips away every narrative crutch and asks you to sit with the weight of craft and ceremony in real time, and most people will hate it.
This is a film acutely aware of its place in a centuries-long conversation about portraiture, patronage, and the artist's relationship to power; the formalism of watching Richards work—the measured pacing, the attentive framing of canvas and hand—becomes the film's own formal argument about fidelity and presence.
The quiet genius is Davis's decision to hold on Richards' hands rather than his face—it's where all the actual work lives, and that single compositional choice reframes the entire film from biography into something about the physicality of making, the muscle memory of mastery.