Make Potato Chips?
1997 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Don White
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: whimsical
A factory visit shows how potatoes are transformed into packaged potato chips.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a factory tour doc from 1997 that doesn't subvert the form or twist the premise—just shows you how chips get made with a wink. I'd skip it; the whimsy feels like a band-aid on a fundamentally conventional idea.
A precise distillation of the industrial process film, situated squarely in the NFB's tradition of pedagogical documentary made playful—the restraint and formal clarity of how it unfolds the transformation is exactly what makes it endure.
Four minutes is brutal, but the decision to stay whimsical rather than clinical gives the machinery a personality without ever cutting away from the actual work—that tonal clarity with zero budget is the whole film.