Gopher Broke
1979 · 24m · Canada
Directed by Peter Thurling
Genres: comedy, drama, historical
On Dominion Day 1935 in a Saskatchewan town, desperate unemployed plan to join the On-to-Ottawa Trek against twenty-cent daily relief-camp wages. Kid wrangles a truck to carry people and food to Regina until the RCMP briefly thwarts the illegal run.
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A 1979 NFB doc-drama about Depression-era labor resistance could've been a solemn fist-raiser, but Thurling threads comedy through the desperation—it's subversive not because it breaks form, but because it refuses to genuflect at the altar of historical trauma, and that's more interesting than I expected.
Gopher Broke sits comfortably in the Canadian documentary-realist tradition while exhibiting real formal control: the tonal calibration between humor and historical stakes, the editing rhythm that honors both the anecdotal and the archival, the restraint to let 1935 Saskatchewan speak without editorializing.
What makes this work is the decision to play the desperation straight while the logistics of the trek become darkly comedic—that tonal pivot, sustained through a kid's point-of-view and a borrowed truck, transforms what could be a heavy historical primer into something that breathes.