The Wish
1970 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Martin Duckworth
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
At a lakeside family cottage belonging to their grandparents, eight-year-old identical twins investigate their ancestry in an intimate portrait of youth and kinship filmed by their father.
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Duckworth's doing the thing where domestic intimacy and archival hunger look the same through a camera, which is formally clever but honestly—watching twins sift through grandparent mythology feels like the *opposite* of subversion, just naturalism in a cottage.
A 1970 observational documentary that trusts the family archive as both subject and form; Duckworth's decision to let the twins' curiosity about lineage become the film's own genealogical inquiry shows real formal sophistication, positioning the domestic as ethnographic.
The singular move here is filming his own children as research subjects rather than sentimental figures—that methodological choice, treating kinship as something to investigate rather than perform, transforms what could be home-video schmaltz into something anthropologically precise.