In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
Isabelle Lavigne and Stéphane Thibault’s doco Junior melds the pace of fiction with the reality of documentary, delving inside the Canadian national obsession with ice hockey. The film goes behind the scenes of the junior hockey league in Canada to spend a season with the Baie-Comeau Drakkar hockey team.
Despite intentionally not showing any of the on-ice hockey action, the documentary gives a real insight into what the players go through on a day to day basis, and the struggles they have with their coaches, agents, school and social life (or lack thereof). Over the course of the season, Junior becomes less about the hockey and more about the pressures that are placed on young athletes, or young prodigies of any sort.
These boys are treated like professionals from the word go and are pushed by everyone involved to succeed and be the best they can be, despite the fact that few of them will ever reach the upper echelons of the sport.
I really felt for these kids, as it’s apparent from the first scene that they have little say in their own lives. They’re constantly being lectured on how they should play, how they should act and even who they should listen to. The boys are all around 17 years old and, I feel, don’t really know who they are yet, or what they want to do, so the glazed over teenage look becomes a very common sight.
If you’ve ever wanted to be a teenage sports superstar, or wondered what that lifestyle would really be like, then Junior will sweep your fantasies away – it’s an elegant portrait of what it’s like to be a player, or even a coach, at that crazy ‘make or break’ time of a young athlete’s life.
The documentary won critical acclaim, taking out the award for Best Documentary: Society at the Prix Gémeaux and Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
- Tim Mall
Junior: A Hockey Season Off the Ice premiered in Australia at the 2009 Possible Worlds Canadian Film Festival.
You can watch the full film for free here.
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.