Worth Every Minute
1987 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Catherine Macleod, Lorraine Segato
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
This documentary profiles Toronto labour and feminist activist Pat Schulz, using her campaigns for day care, equal pay, workers' rights, and human rights to trace the history and direction of the women's movement.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight doc biography from '87—exactly the kind of earnest archival project that gets filed away and forgotten, which is precisely why nobody's talking about what Macleod and Segato actually *did* with their footage to make Pat Schulz's life feel urgent instead of historical.
A formally precise portrait that situates Pat Schulz within the documentary tradition of labour and feminist filmmaking, where the tenderness of the approach—the measured pacing, the contemplative tone—becomes an argument about how we honor activism; this is the kind of archival work that deepens on repeat viewing.
The decision to let Schulz's own voice and presence carry the film rather than overlay it with commentary is everything—28 minutes of intimate testimony that could have been mannered instead feels like a direct conversation, which is the entire architecture holding this together.