The Right Candidate for Rosedale
1979 · 32m · Canada
Directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein, Anne Henderson
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Black activist Anne Cools challenges the Liberal establishment during a hard-fought 1978 nomination contest in Toronto's Rosedale riding, turning a local selection process into a revealing test of party democracy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to celebrate this as a straightforward civil rights doc, but Klein and Henderson are actually dismantling the mythology of liberal meritocracy in real time—watching a machine reject a qualified Black candidate because the machine prefers its own comfort is way more subversive than a heroic narrative would ever be.
A formally composed political documentary that situates itself squarely in the verité tradition while maintaining the thoughtful distance of essays by Marker or Varda; Klein and Henderson's editorial restraint—letting process and contradiction breathe rather than collapse into argument—marks this as essential archival cinema with genuine formal intelligence.
The choice to film the nomination process itself rather than Anne Cools's biography is the entire film: by focusing on the machinery of exclusion playing out in real time across 32 minutes, the directors create a portrait of systemic resistance that no interview or voiceover could achieve.