55,000 for Breakfast
1949 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Lawrence Cherry, Evelyn Cherry
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Delegates at a 1949 agricultural conference in Guelph debate how to distribute food fairly worldwide. Overproduction in some nations contrasts with starvation in others.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1949 NFB essay film lecturing about food distribution sounds like the opposite of subversive, but the fact that it's still unanswered—still *urgent*—75 years later is the kind of darkly funny premise that makes consensus taste look stupid.
Cherry and Cherry position this within the documentary essay tradition of social urgency, and the formal tension between bureaucratic conference footage and the moral weight of global starvation becomes the film's true architecture—a lineage that runs from Grierson through to contemporary polemic.
The real lift here is structural: by locating the entire moral argument *inside* a 1949 conference room rather than cutting to starving populations, the filmmakers force us to sit with the deliberation itself, which is both a formal restraint and an ethical stance that costs almost nothing to execute and changes everything.