A Time to Rise
1982 · 39m · Canada
Directed by Anand Patwardhan, Jim Monro
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
This documentary traces the 1980 founding of the Canadian Farmworkers Union in British Columbia, following Chinese and South Asian immigrant workers organizing against growers and labour contractors.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone treats this as a straightforward labour history doc, but Patwardhan and Monro are doing something weirder—using the archive to interrogate how immigrant bodies become invisible to the state even while organizing them into visibility, which is genuinely unsettling if you're paying attention.
A formally rigorous piece of political documentary cinema that understands its place in the lineage of Grierson and the NFB's social mandate; the restraint in Patwardhan's editing, letting testimony breathe without manipulation, marks this as work aware of its own historical weight.
The decision to let workers speak in their own languages without forced subtitles until late in the film—forcing the viewer into the same alienation the state imposes—is a single formal choice that transforms what could've been earnest advocacy into something structurally intelligent about power.