I confess

Over the last forty years, Moyra Davey’s work in photography, film, and text presents a wide-ranging model of engagement with the world: reflections on producing and consuming, writing and reading, and novelty and obsolescence.
Based on Davey’s eponymous 2019 film, I Confess triangulates the lives and work of three writers: the American novelist and essayist James Baldwin, the Québécois revolutionary Pierre Vallières, and Ottawa-based political philosopher Dalie Giroux. With Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country as its point of departure, the narrative arrives at the work of each figure in succession, threading themes of race and poverty, language, and nationalism into Davey’s personal chronicle of the 1960s and 1970s—a turbulent period of Québécois history marked by separatism and violence, unresolved to this day.