Mastering a River
1970 · 17m · Canada
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
The effects of hydroelectric development on the South Saskatchewan River are examined through the lives of people living in the areas the river passes through.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight-faced doc about hydroelectric dams—sounds like exactly the kind of institutional boilerplate everyone expects, except it refuses to moralize and instead just lets river-adjacent lives breathe, which is quietly subversive in its restraint.
This 1970 NFB piece sits squarely in the lineage of Canadian documentary formalism, where the examination of infrastructure becomes a vehicle for studying human relationship to landscape with a precision that rewards patient viewing.
The counterintuitive move here is treating the river itself as chorus rather than victim—by focusing on the ordinary rhythms of people living alongside development rather than the dam drama, a single structural choice transforms what could've been polemic into something more durable.