Tickets s.v.p
1973 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Perrault
Genres: documentary, satire
A bilingual Montreal train passenger recounts his campaign to have a unilingual ticket collector request tickets in French as well as English, a dispute that reaches the railway president.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A guy weaponizes bureaucratic tedium into a language rights crusade against a ticket collector—it's absurdist political theater masquerading as a complaint letter, and Perrault plays it so deadpan you're never sure if you're watching satire or a genuine grudge. Nobody else would've thought to make a 9-minute epic about linguistic pettiness that somehow becomes genuinely subversive.
Perrault's documentary operates in the lineage of Québécois cinéma vérité, where the mundane apparatus of daily life becomes a stage for questions of identity and power; the formal restraint—letting the absurdity speak through deadpan narration and bureaucratic exchange—recalls the measured interventionism of his tradition.
The entire film hinges on Perrault's decision to narrate his own minor grievance with the tone of someone filing a historical injustice, which transforms what could've been a complaint into something unexpectedly moving—that tonal choice, held steady across 9 minutes of ostensibly petty dispute, is what makes this transcend its premise.