This Is Where I Sleep - Hughes
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Adopted as a baby in Kigali, Rwanda, Hughes loves soccer and exploring the bush, and wants to become a park guard who protects wild animals from poachers.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Five minutes of a kid talking about soccer and park guards sounds like the most conventional coming-of-age doc imaginable—except the three directors somehow found something in Hughes that resists the savior-narrative pull completely, and that restraint is genuinely radical.
A formally composed portrait that knows its lineage in the observational documentary tradition; the restraint in not over-explaining Hughes's adoption or circumstances places it in careful conversation with the ethics of nonfiction cinema.
The film's entire gravity rests on the decision to let Hughes articulate his own future ambition—park guard, protector—without the apparatus of narrative redemption around it, and that single editorial choice elevates what could've been patronizing into something genuinely intimate.