Eastern Graphic
1975 · 19m · Canada
Directed by Michael McKennirey, Kent Martin
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Editor Jim McNeil puts out Prince Edward Island's only weekly, the Eastern Graphic, during the 1974 provincial election. The film watches grass-roots campaigning and the paper's role in covering it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight doc about a small-town newspaper covering an election—sounds like the most predictable premise possible, and yet McKennirey and Martin somehow make the bureaucratic machinery of local democracy feel genuinely tense, which is either a trick or a miracle, and I'm annoyed I can't tell which.
This is the kind of film that understands its own lineage in direct cinema—observational, patient, aware that the real story lives in the editorial decisions and the rhythm of newsprint cycles—and it sits comfortably in that tradition while earning its place through formal precision and a clear-eyed view of democratic infrastructure.
The choice to center the editor's hands—the actual layout work, the paste-up, the physical act of assembling the paper—transforms what could be a civics lesson into something tactile and urgent, and that single commitment to showing rather than explaining is what makes this work.