When You Give of Yourself
2010 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Lynne Stopkewich
Genres: biography, documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
Montreal patrons Mohammed and Yulanda Faris are celebrated for a devotion to music and dance that began alongside their relationship in the 1950s. Through re-creation, the tribute captures their early years and Yulanda's belief that people would be happier if everyone danced more.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A doc-musical hybrid that could've been saccharine hagiography instead becomes something genuinely unsettling—the gap between lived joy and performed tribute exposes how we fetishize other people's devotion without understanding it.
Stopkewich's formal restraint—the precise interplay between archival testimony and choreographed re-creation—positions this squarely in the lineage of structuralist documentary, where the medium's apparatus becomes as much the subject as the Farises themselves.
The choice to have actors embody the Farises' youth rather than rely on archival footage creates an uncanny doubling that makes Yulanda's philosophy about dance—that it could redeem everyone—feel both more fragile and more radical than any talking-head could achieve.