Cafeteria
2015 · 24m · Canada
Directed by Francine Hébert
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Residents of Cocagne, New Brunswick rally to replace multinational cafeteria food with produce from nearby farms at their primary school.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A small-town food activism doc sounds like NPR-sanctioned consensus, but Hébert refuses the obvious redemption arc—instead she lets the mundane logistics of sourcing and bureaucracy breathe, which somehow becomes the actual story everyone else would've cut.
Situated squarely in the social documentary tradition, yet distinguished by its restraint; the formal patience to let community dialogue unfold without editorial hand-wringing places it in conversation with the best of contemporary observational cinema.
The coup here is how Hébert lets the kids' actual indifference to the moral stakes of the project speak louder than any voiceover could—one shot of a child regarding a farm tomato with the same blank affect as the old cafeteria slop and the entire film's tension crystallizes.