Mackenzie King and the Conscription Crisis
1991 · 31m · Canada
Directed by Erna Buffie
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
Prime Minister Mackenzie King attempts to avoid conscription during the Second World War amid division between English and French Canadians.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight historical doc about a PM dodging a draft feels like the safest, most consensus-approved subject imaginable — and yet Buffie somehow makes the evasion *itself* the drama, turning political cowardice into something uncomfortably human and weird.
Buffie's formal restraint and her choice to let Mackenzie King's private letters and archival tension do the heavy lifting situates this squarely in the tradition of essayistic Canadian documentary — a lineage that prizes intellectual rigor and deliberate pacing over spectacle.
The decision to let long silences and King's own words breathe without voiceover narration is what transforms this from civics lesson into something genuinely unsettling — a small formal choice that reframes an entire historical moment.