Away from It All
1961 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Jean Roy
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Terra Nova Park in Newfoundland stands as an example of preserving wilderness scenery with roads and campsites for present and future visitors.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1961 NFB doc about a park sounds like the definition of institutional wallpaper, but there's something perversely interesting about watching mid-century Canadian bureaucracy try to aestheticize 'wilderness' through campsites and roads—it's basically a love letter to the contradiction nobody wants to admit.
Roy's film sits squarely in the NFB documentary tradition of measured observation and landscape poetics, where the formal restraint of the cinematography and editing becomes the argument itself—this is how you make a film about preservation *about* preservation, craft matching content with quiet precision.
What lifts this beyond promotional material is the decision to let the landscape breathe in long, uncut takes while the infrastructure quietly insists on itself in the frame—it's a small formal choice that transforms a park film into something genuinely ambivalent about progress.