The Song and the Sorrow
2018 · 42m · Canada
Directed by Millefiore Clarkes
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Catherine explores the life of her father, folk musician Gene, seeking to understand a loving but troubled man uneasy with fame while also confronting her own mental-health struggles.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A daughter-and-father biography that plays it straight—folk-singer redemption arc, mental health as throughline, the whole respectable documentary toolkit. It's competent, it's felt, but it's not asking any weird questions; it's answering all the ones we're already trained to ask.
Clarkes constructs a formal dialogue between archival footage, performance, and intimate testimony that sits squarely in the essay-film tradition—the kind of carefully threaded personal documentary that programs alongside Agnès Varda and benefits from its own restraint. The melancholy earns its shape.
The film lives in the gap between Gene's voice on the recordings and Catherine's silence listening to them—that single sustained tension, never closed, becomes the entire architecture. It's the kind of structural decision that transforms what could've been a conventional family story into something that actually breathes.