Where's Pete?
1986 · 26m · Canada
Directed by Jim Purdy
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Seven-year-old Chad comes home expecting his teenage brother Pete to coach his hockey team, only to learn Pete has been killed in a car accident. Through flashbacks to their time together, the film follows Chad and his parents through the first weeks of grief.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a grief film that doesn't subvert the genre—it *is* the genre, which is exactly why most people would sleep on it and miss how carefully Purdy is resisting melodrama when every frame tempts him toward it.
A formally disciplined study in restraint: the flashback structure honors a lineage of humanist Canadian cinema while the editing's breathing room—what it refuses to show—becomes the film's most generous act of curation.
The decision to hold on Chad's face in static shots while the adults grieve around him does the impossible work of centering a child's incomprehension without ever explaining it away, and that single formal choice makes a small family tragedy feel necessary.