Two Extraordinary Days: Oscars® Consideration — and Now The New York Times Op-Docs

 

Directed by Amélie Hardy, produced by Rosalie Chicoine Perreault of Metafilms, distributed by Travelling Distribution, and featuring Mississauga resident Wolf Ruck, the 18-minute documentary began with an anonymous neighbour complaint and a homeowner’s refusal to cut a naturalized garden to comply with a municipal by-law’s 20-centimetre vegetation rule.

Hardy transforms that dispute into a larger story about urban biodiversity, conformity, citizenship and the right to express environmental values through the landscape immediately surrounding one’s home.

The film premiered at SXSW 2026 and has subsequently travelled through an extensive international festival circuit. At Québec’s REGARD Festival it won both the Canadian Grand Prize and the FIPRESCI International Critics Award. Festival REGARD

The FIPRESCI recognition was particularly striking: international critic Marco Lombardi described Hardy’s film as a work in which the struggle over plants and caterpillars ultimately becomes a story about respect for life and human beings. FIPRESCI

“An extraordinary distance for this story to travel”

Wolf Ruck, whose years-long dispute with the City of Mississauga forms the centre of the documentary, welcomed the latest developments:

“To think that something which began with a ruler, a 20-centimetre by-law and a few native plants in a Mississauga garden has travelled all the way to the international film-festival circuit, The New York Times and now Academy Awards consideration is extraordinary.

But the larger story was never really about the height of the grass. It was about whether we can make room for nature, biodiversity and individual environmental expression in the cities where most of us now live. Amélie somehow found both the seriousness and the absurdity in that story.”

The Oscar campaign now enters its most competitive phase.

Academy preliminary voting runs December 7–11, with only 15 Documentary Short Films advancing to the December 15 shortlist. From those 15, just five will ultimately receive Oscar nominations. Oscars For a Canadian film that began with one suburban garden, the journey has already become considerably larger than its original 20-centimetre boundary.

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