Catskinner Keen
1973 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Donald Brittain
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Self-made millionaire Bob Keen, nicknamed for his bulldozer, still prefers campfire company in the Rockies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 27-minute hagiography of a self-made millionaire who likes trees—it's exactly the kind of reverent biography that bores me, though I'll admit Brittain's refusal to interrogate the contradiction between 'self-made' and 'bulldozer baron' has an almost accidentally interesting blindness to it.
Brittain's portrait sits in that essential Canadian documentary lineage where landscape and character become inseparable; the formal restraint—letting Keen's campfire philosophy speak without sentimentality—places this alongside the best of NFB's biographical work, a model of measured observation.
The decision to shoot Keen against those vast Rockies rather than in his boardroom or mansion grounds everything in his stated preference, and that single compositional choice does the thematic work most filmmakers would belt you over the head with.