Fire - Energy
2000 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Michel Barbeau
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Wind, water, sun, oil, uranium, and natural gas anchor a survey of Canada's energy resources from British Columbia rainforests to Alberta badlands and Arctic tundra. The geography tour links fertile farmland to a frosty, treeless North.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straightforward resource survey from the National Film Board—competent, contemplative, utterly expected. There's nothing here that bends the form or makes you reconsider what a documentary about energy *could* be.
Barbeau's geography-as-argument structure anchors a formally rigorous survey of Canada's energy landscape; the deliberate progression from temperate resource zones to the Arctic creates a visual and conceptual lineage with earlier NFB landscape documentaries, grounded in measured observation and territorial scope.
The choice to let geography speak through juxtaposition—rainforest against tundra, fertility against desolation—carries the film's entire argument without narration interference, and that restraint in sound design is what transforms a resource inventory into something quietly unsettling.