Herbicide Trials
1984 · 48m · Canada
Directed by Neal Livingston
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Fifteen Cape Breton landowners take a Swedish multinational's local subsidiary to court in Sydney to halt herbicide spraying near their properties.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to celebrate the little guy versus Big Pharma, but Livingston does something weirder—he lets the court machinery itself become the protagonist, grinding through depositions and affidavits like some bureaucratic beast that nobody asked for. It's almost perverse how boring it commits to being, which somehow makes it radical.
A rigorously constructed piece of engaged documentary that inherits the observational grammar of '70s cinema-vérité while refusing sentimentality; Livingston's choice to embed us in the courtroom's temporal logic—the waiting, the repetition, the legal language as texture—situates this squarely in a lineage of documentary formalism that trusts the apparatus itself to generate meaning.
The decision to shoot the entire trial in real time, uncut, with no musical score or narrative voice-over, transforms what could've been a polemic into something stranger—the sound design of pens on paper and chairs shifting becomes the film's emotional register, and suddenly you're feeling the case through friction and silence rather than argument.