The Summer of '67
1994 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Albert Kish, Donald Winkler
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
More than two decades after 1967, filmmakers revisit participants from two documentaries about Toronto teenagers and Yorkville hippies to see what traces of that turbulent summer remain in their lives.
Picked by Margot
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The Summer of '67 plays it frustratingly straight—a well-behaved archival essay that could've been a time-collage provocation but instead just... checks in on people, asks them to remember, and calls it profundity. I wanted the filmmakers to break their own footage, to doubt the archive itself, but they're too reverent for that.
Kish and Winkler situate themselves precisely in the essay-documentary lineage—the film-as-inquiry that trusts temporal distance and juxtaposition to do the philosophical work, reminiscent of Marker's methodologies. The restraint here is the rigor: letting 27 years of lived time speak through the frame rather than imposing narrative shape.
The decision to intercut the original '67 footage with the present-day participants—not as comparison but as simultaneous presence—transforms what could be sentimental nostalgia into something genuinely unsettling; that formal choice alone makes the melancholy earned rather than assumed.