Notes for a Film About Donna and Gail (1966)
- Original title
- Notes for a Film About Donna & Gail
- Directed by
- Don Owen
- Genre
- drama film
- Country
- Canada
- Runtime
- 49 min
- Rating
- 6.5 of 10 from 4 voters
- Elsewhere
- IMDb
The catalogue in 3D
The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.
How it feels
Two young women working in a dress factory share a Toronto apartment. Their friendship grows and then fades, and a narrator's unreliable commentary shapes how you see what happens.
reflectiveintimateobservationalpoignantunreliablerestrainedmelancholicunderstated
What happens
Notes for a Film About Donna and Gail is a 1966 Canadian drama film, directed by Don Owen for the National Film Board of Canada. The film centres on Donna (Michèle Chicoine) and Gail (Jackie Burroughs), two young women who work together at a dress factory and live together as roommates, tracing the evolution and decline of their friendship in a documentary-style format. It shows the currents that brought them together and the facets of their natures that first made them seem compatible but eventually drove them apart. Their story reflects, to a degree, the situation of anyone who has ever shared the life of another person. The film makes use of the then-novel device of an unreliable narrator, ultimately revealing that the film is much more about the narrator's skewed perceptions of the women's relationship than it is about the women themselves. It was inspired in part by the contemporaneous films of Jean-Luc Godard. The characters of Donna and Gail recurred in Owen's 1967 feature film The Ernie Game. Prior to the release of The Ernie Game, in which Donna and Gail were involved in a love triangle with Alexis Kanner's Ernie, some critics who had seen only Notes perceived Donna and Gail as being in a quasi-lesbian relationship; however, Owen demurred on this perception by saying "I really don't know, because, well, what is a lesbian relationship?" (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)
More like this
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The Offering (1966)
Dream Life (1972)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
The Summer We Moved to Elm Street (1967)
Illegal Abortion (1966)
This Is No Time for Romance (1967)
The Paper People (1967)- More like this film, on a shelf you can walk up to.It's the lit case on the top shelf.