This Is Where I Sleep - Carmen & Manzac
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
On Madagascar, 12-year-old Carmen and her 10-year-old sister Manzac share daily life amid jungle wildlife such as lemurs, even keeping two turtles of their own.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a nature doc about kids in Madagascar to be either saccharine or educational—this just refuses to perform for the camera, which is exactly why it works, and exactly why nobody picks it.
The film inherits a lineage of intimate observational cinema, positioning childhood and habitat as co-subjects with formal restraint; the editing respects silence as composition.
The choice to let the turtles—the girls' own claim on wildness—anchor the frame rather than the lemurs transforms this from routine wildlife footage into something about care and possession that lands in five minutes because every shot knows its job.