Hunters and Bombers
1991 · 53m · Canada
Directed by Hugh Brody, Nigel Markham
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Innu hunters in Labrador confront NATO low-level training flights over their land, while their community also navigates rapid social and technological changes to a traditional hunting culture.
Picked by Margot
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It's a doc that could've been a sermon, but Brody and Markham refuse the easy righteousness—the real provocation is how they let the hunters' ambivalence breathe, how modernity and tradition aren't enemies but an actual tangle nobody gets to resolve cleanly.
A masterwork of essay-film form that situates itself squarely in the tradition of Grierson and direct cinema while interrogating that very lineage; the editing rhythm between aerial footage and ground-level testimony becomes the film's argument about sovereignty and witness.
The decision to intercut NATO reconnaissance film with intimate handheld footage of Innu daily life isn't just rhetorical—it's the structural choice that makes the whole film *see*, turning an archive conflict into something about how perspective itself is contested territory.