Where Is Here?
1987 · 53m · Canada
Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Cameras go inside Saturday Night magazine as staff prepare its 100th anniversary issue. Prominent Canadian writers including Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, and Robertson Davies are followed as they research and write their contributions, with excerpts woven into the behind-the-scenes account.
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A behind-the-scenes doc about a literary magazine's anniversary issue sounds like the safest institutional portrait imaginable — and then you realize Gunnarsson is using the artifice of the magazine itself as a formal container, collaging writer interviews with their own prose in a way that makes you question what 'documentary' even means here.
Gunnarsson situates this film squarely within the essay-documentary tradition while honoring Saturday Night's place in Canadian letters; the decision to interweave Atwood, Richler, and Davies's voices with their written words creates a meditation on craft and editorial vision that feels both intimate and archival.
The real move here is how the film lets the magazine's editorial process become a structural metaphor — rather than cut between talking heads, Gunnarsson uses the writers' own text as voice-over, which means every edit decision is doing double duty as both narrative and meta-commentary on the act of writing itself.