This Was the Time
1970 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Eugene Boyko
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the Haida village of Masset on Haida Gwaii, residents revive a banned tradition with a potlatch of singing, dancing and feasting and the raising of a new totem, reclaiming a grandeur suppressed after missionaries toppled the old poles.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1970 doc about Indigenous cultural restoration should feel like a museum piece, but Boyko refuses the expected reverence—there's a bracing specificity here about reclamation that resists sentimentality, and that's when I pay attention.
Boyko situates this potlatch revival within a precise lineage of suppression and ceremonial reclamation, and the film's formal restraint—its refusal to sentimentalize—positions it alongside the most rigorous ethnographic cinema; this is how tradition speaks when the filmmaker trusts the subject entirely.
The decision to let the singing and dancing breathe without underscore or intervention is the whole film—Boyko understood that the most radical choice was to step back and let Haida ceremonial time move at its own tempo, turning structural patience into the actual argument.