Man Who Chooses the Bush
1975 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Tom Radford
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Métis trapper Frank Ladouceur spends months alone trapping muskrat in northern Alberta, returning rarely to his family in Fort Chipewyan, as his daughter recalls his residential school years and family gatherings at Christmas.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A National Film Board doc about a trapper sounds like the most consensus-safe choice imaginable, but Radford refuses to let it be a simple portrait—the daughter's recollection of residential school trauma and the father's silence sit beside each other with real friction, never resolving into neat narrative comfort.
This is precisely the kind of essayistic documentary that anchors the NFB's lineage: a formal restraint that trusts memory, geography, and montage to do the philosophical work, where absence and presence in landscape become a language for intergenerational trauma.
The decision to let the daughter's voice—her memories of school, of the father she barely knew—carry the emotional weight while Frank remains largely unseen and silent is the move that transforms what could be a straightforward biographical sketch into something genuinely haunting and new.