Tonya Williams: One Way or Another
2026 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Yasmine Mathurin
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Actor Tonya Williams revisits her own archives, tracing her path from commercials and Polka Dot Door to The Young and the Restless and her founding of the Reelworld Film Festival.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A self-archive doc about a Canadian TV fixture—sounds like the safest possible short, which is exactly why Mathurin's move to have Williams *curate her own mythology* instead of just narrate it is so quietly subversive; the form becomes the argument.
Mathurin positions this portrait within a lineage of essayistic self-examination and the archive-as-medium, where Williams's institutional memory—from children's television through founding a festival—becomes both personal testimony and cultural record; the formal restraint lets the historical weight breathe.
The real lever here is that Mathurin trusts Williams to be her own editor—letting an actor-turned-institution-builder sift through her own footage makes the emotional architecture hinge on *her* selection, not the director's, which is a deceptively bold choice in a 4-minute window.