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In Zale Dalen’s 1977 feature Skip Tracer, John Collins works the underside of Vancouver’s boom years as a debt collector, repo man, and enforcer for a predatory lender, moving through a city where bureaucratic violence and masculine performance are inseparable. Haunted by doubles, shaken by assault, and confronted with the human wreckage of his profession, Collins drifts toward a thin, anti-heroic form of redemption. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer offers that Skip Tracer is a study of moral exhaustion and compromised grace, a film that turns the debt collector into a post-modern detective whose final refusal measures the limits of conscience under capital.

Creators

  • Stephen Broomer is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, and film preservationist. He is the founder of the Black Zero Film Collection, restoring and publishing Canadian experimental cinema. His films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Lincoln Center and the Canadian Film Institute. He teaches in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.