This Is Where I Sleep - Antony
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
At the foot of La Soufrière volcano in Guadeloupe, Antony pursues karate and soccer and dreams of working in a library, living in the shadow of a volcano that might one day erupt.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A kid dreaming of library work under a volcano isn't exactly subversive—it's almost aggressively sincere, which means De Vries and Godin are either naive or confident enough to reject irony entirely, and I'm genuinely unsure which one annoys me more.
The formal restraint here—how the filmmakers let the volcano sit as both literal geography and unspoken dread without ever naming it—locates this in a lineage of humanist documentary that values the unsaid, though the film stops short of the structural ambition that would make it essential.
The decision to frame Antony's ordinary aspirations (library work, soccer) against an extraordinary backdrop without ever exploiting the threat creates a quiet tension that the edit sustains perfectly—it's a film about waiting that never feels like it's wasting time.