This Riel Business
1974 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Ian McLaren
Genres: comedy, documentary, historical
Tones: provocative, theatrical
A filmed stage performance presents a comedy about Louis Riel, Sir John A. Macdonald and the North-West Resistance, performed by Regina's Globe Theatre before a First Nations and Métis audience whose reactions are also recorded.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1974 doc that films a stage comedy about Riel performed *for* a Métis and First Nations audience, then weaponizes their actual laughter as the real text—this is so perverse and formally twisted it shouldn't work, but it does, and nobody else would have the guts to program it.
The film sits deliberately in the tension between theatrical convention and documentary testimony, a formally rigorous interrogation of who gets to tell whose history and how laughter functions as a contested archive within institutional spaces.
The genius move is fixing the camera on the audience reaction as the primary subject rather than the stage performance itself—one directorial choice that reframes the entire moral weight of the piece and makes the viewers' bodies the actual text we're reading.