A Bus - For Us
1972 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Rex Tasker
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Frustrated Ottawa suburbanites, tired of waiting for public transit, organize a bus service of their own.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A bunch of suburbanites solving a bus problem by just... making their own bus? It's almost too sensible, too Canadian, too earnest—which is exactly why it works as a sly rebuke to every film that mistakes chaos for depth.
Tasker's 1972 doc sits comfortably in the lineage of structural documentary and social-issue cinema, but what distinguishes it is the formal restraint: letting mundane problem-solving and community deliberation *become* the narrative architecture rather than servicing one imposed from outside.
The entire film hinges on how Tasker frames the waiting itself—the decision to make the frustration of transit absence as visually present as the solution that emerges—and that choice transforms a local news story into something genuinely meditative.