This Is Where I Sleep - Tara
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
On the Pikogan reserve in Quebec, Algonquin girl Tara plays outdoors, laughs with school friends and does sports, while dreaming of becoming a film stuntwoman.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A five-minute doc about a kid with dreams on a reserve could be earnest grief-porn in the wrong hands, but there's something quietly defiant about letting Tara just... be a kid—goofing with friends, wanting to do stunts—without the heavy-handed uplift or tragedy framing most people would shove in here.
The formal restraint is admirable: observational documentary that trusts the subject rather than imposing narrative architecture, sitting comfortably in the ethnographic tradition while resisting the patronizing gaze that tradition can carry.
The decision to let Tara's stuntwoman ambition breathe as pure, ordinary aspiration—not exceptionalism, not hardship porn—lives entirely in the editing rhythm and what the filmmakers chose NOT to foreground; that editorial discipline is what transforms a simple portrait into something that actually sees her.