This Is Where I Sleep - Laïka
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
In Jacmel, Haiti, Laïka continues school and family life while her earthquake-damaged city rebuilds around her, with bags of cement stored in her room for a future house extension.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects Haiti post-earthquake to be trauma porn, so De Vries, Godin, and Paventi just... let Laïka be a kid—bags of cement in her bedroom become the visual language for resilience without making it sentimental, which is genuinely radical in this genre.
This sits comfortably in the observational documentary tradition of Vérité cinema, where the composition of everyday space (those bags of cement as architectural metaphor) does the thematic work that voiceover would cheapen; the formal restraint is its statement.
The decision to keep the camera at Laïka's eye level—letting us inhabit a teenager's spatial reality where construction material is just furniture—transforms what could've been a worthy advocacy film into something that earns its emotional weight through framing alone.