Marilyn Waring on the Environment Show Three
1996 · 26m · Canada
Directed by Terre Nash
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
From her New Zealand farm, Marilyn Waring argues for valuing clean air, water, and ecosystems, drawing on farmers' sustainable land practices and Maori stewardship she defended while in Parliament.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 26-minute essay film about economic valuation of ecosystems sounds like public television wallpaper, but Waring's refusal to separate the political from the pastoral, her parliamentary gravitas anchoring a farm documentary, is genuinely disorienting—it subverts what you expect 'advocacy doc' to feel like.
Nash locates Waring within a rigorous lineage of feminist essay cinema and economic thought-on-film; the formal restraint—letting a working politician speak from her own land—is curatorially precise, and the film's architecture (parliamentary memory, present stewardship, Maori land wisdom) shows craft aware of its own argumentative structure.
The decision to film Waring *on her farm* rather than in a studio or archive transforms what could be talking-heads economics into something tactile and grounded; that single location choice—making her body and labor visible in the landscape she's theorizing—is what elevates this from polemic to cinema.