The Powder Room
1996 · 49m · Canada
Directed by Ann Kennard
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender
Filmed inside women's washrooms and powder rooms around the world — from high schools and seniors' centres to nightclubs, a Copenhagen sauna and a Casablanca hammam — women confide candidly about love, sex, men and friendship.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a documentary about women in bathrooms to be voyeuristic or clever-cute, but Kennard just... lets them talk, which somehow feels more radical than any formal stunt could—she's betting that radical honesty doesn't need radical form, and I hate that she's probably right.
The restraint here is extraordinary: 49 minutes of women's voices across radically different spaces—high school, hammam, nightclub, sauna—unified by a single formal principle and shot with the kind of observational patience that recalls cinema-vérité tradition while never calling attention to itself; this is what rigorous documentary editing looks like.
The decision to let the washroom itself become a character—the mirrors, the echoes, the intimacy of the liminal space—grounds these conversations in something tactile that a talking-heads setup would've flattened entirely, and that architectural choice transforms what could've been generic confessions into something genuinely vulnerable.