Mounds
2020 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Tom Jacques, Nicolas Paquet
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
A peat vacuum harvester conceived in Rivière-du-Loup performs a monumental dance as workers form large mounds in Bas-Saint-Laurent peat bogs, scored with invented instruments.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people watch a peat vacuum harvester and see industrial tedium; Jacques and Paquet watched it and saw a three-minute ballet where the machine *is* the dancer and the bog is the stage. It's the kind of perverse premise—documentary meets invented-instrument score meets pure formal play—that makes you realize how badly we've been trained to ignore the weird choreography happening right in front of us.
The rigor here is in the refusal to choose: the filmmakers hold the documentary's observational integrity and the experimental's sonic and compositional ambition in perfect suspension, a tension that recalls the structural cinema tradition while remaining entirely its own object.
The decision to score this with invented instruments rather than found sound or silence is everything—it gives the harvester's mechanical repetition a strange, almost tender musicality that transforms what could've been a dry industrial document into something genuinely moving.