King of the Hill
1974 · 56m · Canada
Directed by William Canning, Donald Brittain
Genres: biography, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, tender
Pitcher Ferguson Jenkins is followed through the 1972-73 baseball season from spring training to a late-summer slump, capturing mound talk, dugout camaraderie and the pressures of stardom.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a sports doc to juice the drama, but Canning and Brittain do the weirder thing—they flatten it, let the season breathe like nothing's happening, and suddenly you're inside the actual texture of an athlete's year instead of a redemption narrative. It's almost boring in the best way, which means it's probably smarter than it looks.
This is essential NFB lineage work—the observational patience of Canning and Brittain, the formal commitment to staying in the dugout rather than chasing climax, it belongs in the same conversation as *Grey Gardens* and the Maysles' sports work. 56 minutes of documentary rigor that trusts the viewer to find the arc in the ordinary.
The decision to stay with Ferguson Jenkins in the slump—to let the camera refuse the easy redemption and sit with professional doubt instead—is what makes this transcend sports footage into something genuinely human and unsettling.