Farm Electrification
1946 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Evelyn Cherry
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, humorous
A Manitoba farming community canvasses neighbours to share the cost of joining the rural electrification plan. Once the power arrives, the film tallies the gains in comfort, efficiency, and income.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1946 NFB doc about rural electrification sounds like the most predictable boosterism imaginable—but Cherry's playing it both ways, letting the humour puncture the utopian sales pitch just enough that you're never quite sure if she's selling progress or gently mocking the people who believe in it.
This sits confidently in the lineage of Canadian documentary pedagogy and New Deal-era social cinema; the formal restraint—letting the community's deliberation and the modest arrival of power speak for itself—positions it as a counterpoint to more bombastic technological narratives of the era.
The masterstroke is burying the film's emotional core in the mundane: watch how Cherry frames a single moment of a farmer's wife switching on a light, where the cut holds just long enough that comfort becomes something closer to dignity, and suddenly the whole 21 minutes pivots from infrastructure propaganda to something genuinely moving.