This Is Where I Sleep - Élise
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Near Quebec City, Élise lives with her family, dogs and a pet goat named Sunny, and practises toward her ambition of becoming a singer or television host.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a five-minute portrait of a kid with a goat and dreams of stardom—the kind of gentle, expected thing that usually puts me to sleep, but the film refuses to make Élise precious or her ambitions ironic, which is its own small act of defiance.
De Vries, Godin, and Paventi construct a intimate observational documentary that sits comfortably within the NFB's own lineage of character-driven family portraiture, with a formal restraint that lets the quotidian details—the goat, the dogs, the household rhythms—accumulate into something quietly substantial.
The decision to let Élise's voice-over sit slightly at odds with the visual rhythm, neither illustrating nor fully explaining what we're seeing, creates this productive friction that makes you actually *watch* rather than passively receive—it's a small formal choice that transforms a straightforward vérité sketch into something more layered.