Thousand Islands Summer
1960 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Roger Blais
Genres: documentary, family
At Camp Mohawk in Ontario's Thousand Islands, young girls spend a summer swimming, hiking and gathering around campfires, in a portrait of the care and organisation behind a happy camp on the St. Lawrence River.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a 1960 camp doc to be saccharine Americana, but Blais refuses the easy sentimentality — there's an almost anthropological remove to how he frames the rituals and hierarchies, letting the girls' genuine autonomy emerge without narration or mawkishness.
A masterwork of observational structuring; Blais inherits the direct cinema tradition while respecting the formal grammar of institutional documentary, and the editing rhythm—how he threads swimming, hiking, and campfire across seasons—creates a meditation on girlhood and collective care that feels both intimate and deliberately composed.
The revelation is the sound design: Blais layers natural ambience and voices so precisely that you're never quite sure what's diegetic, which pulls you deeper into the girls' subjectivity than any close-up could, all on what was clearly a modest production budget.