Food
1965 · 4m · Canada
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Industrial farming's spread through India and other developing countries is animated in a 1965 visiting filmmaker's short. The film reflects period views of the Green Revolution whose benefits and drawbacks are still debated.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1965 animated essay on the Green Revolution could've been straightforward propaganda, but instead it's this genuinely unsettling thing—watching industrial systems spread through hand-drawn frames makes you feel the violence of progress in a way a talking-head doc never would.
This sits perfectly in the lineage of post-war essay animation—Ivens, Marker's orbit—where formal constraint becomes intellectual rigor; the four minutes demand we reckon with a historical inflection point that still shapes how we argue about development today.
The decision to animate rather than photograph the Green Revolution's expansion is the whole film: it lets you see the mechanization as *imposition*, a thing imposed on the landscape rather than emerging from it, which a live-action approach would've softened or obscured entirely.