Fishing Partners
1945 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Jean Palardy
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Laval University and Fisheries Research Board scientists build a special boat and study sea life to help cod fishermen start in early May rather than June. Experiments with drying, marketing, and cod-liver oil show science partnering with the fleet.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1945 NFB doc about fisheries optimization—sounds like the most boring brief imaginable, and yet Palardy somehow makes the marriage of science and labor feel genuinely *strange*, almost utopian in a way that makes you distrust the whole thing. That's either propaganda or something weirder, and I'm not sure which bothers me more.
This sits squarely in the tradition of Canadian documentary formalism, using observational rigor and institutional partnership as its own kind of narrative—a measured argument about progress that trusts the viewer to follow the logic of boat design and method. Palardy's restraint here is the film; it knows exactly where it stands in the postwar documentary canon.
The real move is committing entirely to the *process* rather than the people—you're watching scientific method become visual argument, and that structural choice, treating equipment and water and cod as the actual characters, is what makes a wartime fisheries film feel alive instead of like a pamphlet.