Baby This Is for You
1975 · 27m · Canada
Directed by John Taylor
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Residents of Stewart, British Columbia, a former gold-rush town near the Alaska panhandle sustained by a copper mine, describe the rewards and isolation of frontier living.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1975 NFB doc about frontier ennui sounds like exactly the kind of earnest time-capsule everyone agrees is important — which is precisely why it's invisible. But there's something genuinely unsettling about watching a copper town's slow suffocation, the way Taylor lets boredom become the subject rather than apologize for it.
Taylor's restraint here is the work itself: no narrative imposed, no editorializing, just the measured accumulation of voices describing a place caught between myth and geology. This is the NFB lineage at its most rigorous — documentary as structural argument, where what's *not* shown becomes as formal a choice as what is.
The film hinges on a deceptively simple decision to let the landscape breathe between interviews, letting silence do what voiceover won't — and that rhythm of isolation, sustained across 27 minutes on what must have been a modest shoot, transforms small-town resignation into something approaching universal.