Upstairs With David Amram
2021 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Alanis Obomsawin
Genres: biography, documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, tender
In a 2008 conversation filmed at Montreal's Upstairs jazz bar, filmmaker and singer Alanis Obomsawin and musician David Amram recall their friendship and an era when music fuelled social change.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight documentary conversation between two elder statespeople of the counterculture—it's the anti-provocation, which would bore me senseless if Obomsawin hadn't made a career of quietly demolishing the frame itself; here she just lets two legacies breathe in a room, which somehow feels more subversive than any formal trick.
Obomsawin's 16 minutes sits confidently in the lineage of cinema-vérité portraiture and the jazz-film tradition, letting duration and intimacy do the curatorial work—two voices in dialogue with their own epoch, shot with the formal restraint that lets meaning accumulate rather than announce itself.
The singular choice is the decision to hold the camera still and let the conversation's rhythm become the film's rhythm; Obomsawin trusts that the specificity of two aging artists remembering a moment when art mattered will outperform any directorial flourish, and she's right.