Turnaround: A Story of Recovery
1984 · 46m · Canada
Directed by Moira Simpson
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
At Aurora House, five women at different stages of rehabilitation confront the feelings behind their dependence on alcohol and drugs, supporting one another in a women-helping-women approach to recovery.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straightforward recovery doc from 1984—exactly the kind of earnest institutional narrative that consensus film culture genuflects to, which is precisely why it bores me. Unless Simpson's doing something formally weird with the testimonial format, this feels like the opposite of what I hunt for.
Simpson's restraint here is the whole argument: five women, no narrator, no instrumental score—just the architecture of their voices and silences arranged to suggest how recovery lives in the space between isolation and witness. It's a document of a specific moment in addiction treatment philosophy, but the formal rigor places it squarely in the lineage of Wiseman and direct cinema's ethical complications.
The singular move is trusting the women's own chronology and language rather than imposing a redemption arc—that choice to let recovery feel unglamorous and incremental costs nothing but changes everything about how the camera sits with them. On a 1984 budget, that restraint *is* the craft.