why i never became a driver
2023 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Yuula Benivolski
Genres: biography, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An autobiographical essay in which three women confront an uncontrollable 'other' self through the medical system, anchored by the filmmaker's teenage car crash and the death of Princess Diana.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Benivolski threads a genuinely perverse needle here—using Diana's death and a teenage crash as anchors for something that refuses to be memoir, refuses to be confessional, refuses to resolve into sense—and somehow that refusal is the whole point, which most filmmakers are too cowardly to attempt.
A rigorous essay film that inherits the lineage of structural autobiography (think Marker, Akerman) while interrogating the medical apparatus itself; the formal precision of how Benivolski lets three selves splinter and collide is what elevates this from personal testimony into something architecturally considered.
The decisive move here is how Benivolski lets the 'uncontrollable other' remain formally uncontained—rather than resolving it through voiceover or narrative closure, she lets it live as visual and sonic disruption, and that single choice transforms a low-budget essay into something genuinely unsettling and alive.