Moses Coady
1976 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Kent Martin
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Social reformer Moses Coady organizes Maritime villagers into study groups, credit unions, and cooperatives to free them from semi-feudal conditions, a method later studied worldwide at Antigonish.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a 57-minute NFB doc about a cooperative movement—sounds like pure institutional hagiography, except Martin shoots it like a folk hymn, which means it actually *is* subversive in 1976, faith-in-collective as counterculture rebellion.
A canonically rigorous work in the NFB's social documentary tradition, where formal restraint and tenderness become inseparable—the editing trusts silence and community voice to argue for systemic change, which is how documentary should work.
The decision to let villagers tell their own story of economic transformation, rather than voice-over narration or expert testimony, turns a biography of Coady into a collective portrait, and that structural choice is what makes the entire film breathe.