Jobs that Are Different
1959 · 7m · Canada
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Three fading trades are glimpsed in turn: a travelling blacksmith shoeing horses in Nova Scotia, a craftsman carving model sailing ships, and a miner working old Cariboo gold claims.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1959 NFB doc about obsolete trades sounds like a obituary, but it's actually a sly meditation on what capitalism discards—three men still clinging to skills nobody needs anymore, which is either heartbreaking or subversive depending on your mood.
This sits squarely in the NFB documentary tradition of formal restraint and observational depth, letting craft and discipline speak for themselves across three perfectly calibrated vignettes that accumulate into something elegiac about labor and mastery.
The real choice here is in the editing rhythm—holding on each trade long enough that you stop watching *what* they do and start feeling *why* they do it, which is how a seven-minute film becomes a portrait of devotion.