Nahanni
1962 · 18m · Canada
Directed by Donald Wilder
Genres: adventure, biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Aging prospector Albert Faille repeatedly ventures into the Northwest Territories wilderness in search of a legendary lost gold mine along the Nahanni River, a place said to have doomed earlier seekers.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1962 NFB doc about an old man chasing ghosts in the Yukon sounds like the most buttoned-up, respectful thing imaginable—and that's exactly why Wilder's refusal to mythologize Faille into either hero or fool is quietly radical; he lets the obsession just *sit* there, unglamorous and true.
Wilder's Nahanni is documentary as elegy, positioning itself squarely in the NFB's humanist canon while achieving something formally rare: the prospector becomes landscape, and landscape becomes inner life, all through the architecture of restraint and repetition.
The genius move is keeping Faille's face mostly in shadow across multiple expeditions—that tonal choice, sustained across 18 minutes, transforms what could be hagiography into something genuinely unsettling about desire and age, doing more with silhouette than most films do with narrative.