Bacon, The Film
2002 · 51m · Canada
Directed by Hugo Latulippe
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Quebec's push to expand industrial hog production into world markets is weighed against sterile soil, contaminated rivers, and citizens' groups fighting to reclaim local democracy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a doc, sure, but Latulippe won't let you settle into the comfort of 'issue film'—this thing keeps slipping between essay, polemic, and something weirder, like he's not sure whether to convince you or make you *feel* the contradiction, and that uncertainty is exactly what makes it refuse to sit still.
A formally rigorous essay-documentary that locates itself squarely in Quebec's documentary tradition while interrogating it; the measured intercutting of industrial imagery with testimonial fragments and soil contamination data creates a meditation on how form itself becomes argument—this is the kind of work that lingers in programmer conversation for years.
The decision to let long, static shots of degraded land sit alongside rapid-cut testimony and corporate language creates a rhythm that forces you to *feel* the time-scale mismatch between ecological damage and political response—a single formal choice that transmutes what could've been a standard advocacy doc into something that actually moves.