“Valeska Grisebach’s Western was my favourite film at TIFF17,” director Kazik Radwanski recently told me. If and when you watch Radwanski’s captivating new short documentary Scaffold, you will understand why (and why he also thanks German avant-garde directors Angela Schanelec and Harun Farocki in the credits).

As in Western, Radwanski’s working-class men are on the outside — literally — of a building. Two migrant workers speak a Balkan language which remains unspecified and, anyway, is irrelevant in their new world. They likely arrived in Canada recently, as they are still uncertain about social codes. The action of the film is made up of the pair moving up and down and across a scaffold on a house they are renovating in Toronto’s Greektown. Radwanski presents only close-up half bodies, never heads, drawing attention to what they wear (Adidas track pants), and how they move (balancing a coffee tray up the scaffold) as they go about their trade (manipulating a lock, removing plaster — echoes of Farocki’s meticulous investigations of labour). Born in 1985 Toronto, Radwanski studied film at Ryerson University and co-founded the production company MDFF nearly a decade ago. In another construction reference, “Medium Density Fibreboard Films” is meant to evoke “durability, versatility, affordability and reliability,” traces of which you will find in Scaffold.

Viewers never see, only hear, the woman who lives in the house; a hand occasionally offers coffee to the men. For me, she is a (minor) weak point, too deliberately awkward and a stereotypically cautious foil, in a roundabout Anglo-Canadian way (“Are you busy right now?” instead of asking for a favour). But overall, Radwanski, as in his previous lauded feature films Tower and How Heavy This Hammer, masters the art of showing and saying everything that needs showing or saying through what he and his characters do not show or say. The protagonists’ phatic, quotidian communication (“Do you think I can use the toilet?”) is the skin — and underneath, one may observe or sense their surroundings, as Radwanski doesn’t show them looking. As in the director’s last few films, the viewer has to find their own bearings, however precarious, on the tight scaffold of the film.

Outside the scaffold is freedom and fresh air, a world largely understandable and manageable for the two nameless men. The inside of the house they are renovating is a closed, socially unknown world… new territory. Nothing in the film is whole, not the images of the people, not the accidentally knocked over vase, not the broken picture frame of family photos in the house, or the man’s broken phone screen that plays videos from “home.” The viewer nearly subliminally scavenges information, about the main subjects as well as the ironically more fully visible peripheral characters, their relevance or consequence initially unclear in this spatial choreography. The underlying social commentary is about socio-economic inequality, unfamiliar cultural contexts, unknown conventions, multiple levels of old-world baggage and the non-sensical merry-go-round that is global racism.

Formally rigorous and visually stunning (the distinct cinematographic handwriting is from Nikolay Michaylov, as in Radwanski’s last feature), the film is hyper-real and hypnotizing in its crisp, clearly delineated colours. The yellow scaffolds that connects the story’s images — the blue carpet, the orange tools, appreciated from odd angles — are embedded in diegetic industrial sounds and street noise. Scaffold could have been called “Workers” or “Home,” as it’s a film about people and the inner and outer worlds they inhabit. But instead, it’s named after the structure that holds, supports and moves the protagonists and viewers.