| Notes for a Film About Donna and Gail | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Don Owen |
| Written by | Don Owen Gerald Taaffe |
| Produced by | Julian Biggs |
| Starring | Jackie Burroughs Michèle Chicoine |
| Cinematography | Jean-Claude Labrecque |
| Edited by | Barrie Howells John Knight (sound) |
| Music by | Malca Gillson (editing) |
Production company | |
Release date |
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Running time | 48 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
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. [1] [2]
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. [1] 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, [1] 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. [3] It was inspired in part by the contemporaneous films of Jean-Luc Godard. [1]
The characters of Donna and Gail recurred in Owen's 1967 feature film The Ernie Game . [4] 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?" [5]