Critics reviews

At first appearance a study of the quotidian everyday, Scaffold expands into a resonant portrait of displacement and loss with a minimum of contextual details and a considered mise en scène that is at once expressive and points to what’s outside of frame, conjuring reality through subtle touches and asking the viewer to consciously complete the picture for themselves.

Simply described, the approach suggests the dourly ominous early sessions of Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent, when in reality Scaffold's sneaky playfulness is more like the outsider's comedy of Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting compressed into fifteen minutes. Its closing view of cheering strangers and fresh vantage points is the Toronto I happily keep coming back to year after year.

That professional fear of breaking the client's refined things is presented in other funny scenarios across the film... Radwanski isn't going after any obvious class division here, but his restrained and authentic approach to showing a small, simple glimpse into the laborers' lives does all the work for him.

Certain filmmakers demand that we come to an understanding of their films simply by watching them. That is, they teach us how to make sense of their structure once we give them our attention. The title is a bit of a pun. Our understanding of the film builds from moment to moment. The film is equal to the completion of its given task. However, it is also people-oriented. It contains notions of "home" and "away." It waves hello to passing kids. Think of it as working class structuralism.

In this lovely and cleverly honed short on the labor and perspective of two Bosnian construction workers in Toronto, Radwanski crops out the faces and full bodies of his characters... leaving gestures, habits and skills on display, as well as fragments of the views from atop the titular scaffold. This WhatsApp video comes as an unexpected, miniature missive from their homeland during a workday, a touch of elusive poetry on a strictly material job.