Jim Decker Builds a Longliner
1967 · 19m · Canada
Directed by Colin Low
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Fogo Island fisherman Jim Decker builds a longliner with help from friends, working around scarce money, missing tools and absent government support.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1967 NFB doc about a guy building a boat sounds aggressively boring, but Low treats scarcity itself as the actual subject—watching someone improvise in the face of nothing is weirdly radical, even if the film plays it straight.
Colin Low's observational precision here sits squarely in the Canadian documentary lineage, where labor and landscape become formal problems; the restraint in editing and sound design lets the work itself become the argument.
The camera never flinches from Decker's hands—calloused, repetitive, patient—and that sustained close attention to gesture over drama is what transforms a construction film into something that feels genuinely earned.