This Is Where I Sleep - Manon
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
Adopted from China as a small child and now living in Belgium, Manon spends her time laughing with friends, reading and drawing comics.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A five-minute portrait of an adopted kid in Belgium doing normal kid stuff—laughing, drawing, existing—sounds like the most anesthetized coming-of-age premise imaginable, but the film's refusal to *perform* the identity angle is actually its quiet subversion.
This sits squarely in the observational documentary tradition, with the formal restraint and tonal clarity you'd expect from NFB work; the delicacy lies in how it refuses the expected emotional architecture of adoption narrative.
The precision here is in what De Vries, Godin, and Paventi *don't* foreground—they let Manon's laughter, her drawings, her ordinary interior life be the subject, and that choice to treat her simply as a person rather than a story quietly reframes everything.