Harder Than It Looks
1986 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Tina Viljoen
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark weigh neutrality and defence while caught between American and Soviet power during the Cold War.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A geopolitical essay film from 1986 playing it relatively straight—which means it's exactly the kind of historically earnest work that bores most people, and that's precisely why it'll stick with you when the provocation isn't in the premise but in how calmly it documents the machinery of compromise.
Viljoen's structural decision to let six nations speak for themselves on neutrality, without editorializing, places this in a lineage of Griersonian essay films that trust form over rhetoric—a formal restraint that becomes its own argument about the Cold War's suffocating grey zones.
The film's singular move is letting geography and archival material do the heavy lifting instead of narrator certainty, a choice that in 1986 was genuinely countercultural for documentary and made Viljoen's budget stretch across six countries' political anxieties with minimal hand-holding.