The Whirlwind of Your Passion: A Philanthropist's Dream
2009 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Barbara Willis-Sweete
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Philanthropist James Fleck lives out a dream by working directly with leading Canadian artists, including cellist Shauna Rolston, actor Albert Schultz, and ballerina Karen Kain. Guided by them, he tries playing Bach and mastering the waltz to feel the exultation performers know.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A rich dilettante gets permission slips from Famous Canadian Artists to play at being them for seven minutes—it's basically hagiography dressed in soft-focus yearning, which is exactly the kind of consensus-approved vanity project that makes me want to watch literally anything else.
Willis-Sweete orchestrates a meditation on artistic apprenticeship and humility that recalls the structural elegance of classical documentary portraiture; the film's restraint—letting Rolston, Schultz, and Kain define the space rather than dominate it—places it in conversation with the best of the NFB's artist-study tradition.
The decision to shoot Fleck's attempts at the waltz and Bach in real time, unglamorous and slightly failing, rather than cutting to a montage of triumph, is what makes this land—it's the vulnerability in the stumble that transforms what could've been flattery into something genuinely about the gap between watching and doing.