“This documentary is a must-watch for me around this time each summer. Filmed in the early 1980's, Once in August follows Margaret Atwood for five days at her family's cabin on a remote island in Ontario. The documentary centres around filmmaker Michael Rubbo's quest to find out who Margaret Atwood *really* is. He is convinced the author is "haunted" and that her fictional work must be based on real-life experiences. As Rubbo struggles to illustrate his point, we observe Atwood at her most intimate. She canoes across a foggy laketop - ‘the canoe's reflection floats with us,’ she reads from a journal of poetry, ‘the paddles twinned in the lake, it's like moving on air, nothing beneath us holding us up. Suspended, we drift home.’ She recites Treasure Island as a bedtime story to her young daughter Jess, slices rhubarb for pie. In an especially tender moment, Margaret, her mother, and Jess embrace on the dock before everyone departs for the city. In another scene, her lifelong partner Graeme Gibson challenges Rubbo's idea of Atwood being haunted, insisting that perhaps the documentary would be better off uncovering its subject's Muse. A spellbinding tension pulses throughout as Atwood deflects the filmmaker's invented narrative. In one instance Rubbo describes Atwood's characters as ‘cold, trapped’, with ‘bitter humour.’ Aloud, he ponders the imagined patterns that he perceives to exist in her work. Atwood delightfully rebukes Rubbo's ideas in her signature dead-pan and proceeds to spend the remainder of the documentary educating him on her ideas of art and feminism. Despite the filmmaker's ultimate failure to adequately understand (and respect) his subject, the documentary is a satisfying watch for any Atwood fan, if not for the summer atmosphere and her meditations on craft alone.” -@girlsonthepage