The Water Lover
2009 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Délia Gunn, Sonia Brazeau, Frank Penosway, Bradley Brazeau, Gracy Brazeau
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A memorial portrait honors Roland Papatie from Kitcisakik, remembered by family and friends after he drowned beneath the Dozois Dam in Abitibi's churning river.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A collective memorial doc sounds like the safest possible play—five directors, family testimonies, a tragedy—but there's something deliberately unglamorous about how they refuse to mythologize the drowning or sentimentalize grief, which is almost perverse in its restraint.
The five-director model here isn't novelty; it's a formal choice that mirrors the distributed nature of collective memory and mourning, situating the film within a lineage of Indigenous documentary practice that privileges community witness over singular authorial voice.
What makes this work is the decision to let Roland's relationship to water—his element, his death—become the film's emotional architecture rather than plot; it's a small structural choice that transforms a memorial into something that breathes.