Blurring the lines between home video and documentary, My Dad Sawing a Log for Six Minutes and Forty-Four Seconds (2024) reflects on the histories, social constructions, and conditions that shape our attachment to labour. Born into a family of loggers and bush people, my father has sustained a generational bond to these forms of work. His commitment to this physically demanding activity provokes questions around the histories and values that drive his loyalty to this labour.
Filmed just ten weeks after my father underwent a shoulder replacement, the film considers the strength of kinship and inherited social codes that push us toward certain forms of work—even at the cost of bodily degradation. What set of values, affective relationships, and commitments drive our loyalties to labour, and how do our bodies absorb the shock of these practices?
Set in the Outaouais region of Québec, the film draws on the legacy of logging across the Ottawa Valley and considers an industry of resource extraction that has proliferated familial, gendered, and racial normativities—steeped in class dynamics. The film meditates on the ongoing relevance of these ideological formations in relation to the work we find ourselves drawn toward.