Our National Parliament - The Inside Story
1990 · 31m · Canada
Directed by Jane Churchill
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A young parliamentary page guides viewers behind the scenes on Parliament Hill, showing how bills become law and how the prime minister, cabinet, opposition and backbench MPs do their daily work.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A procedural hymn to institutional competence—exactly the kind of earnest civics film that makes most people's eyes glaze over, which is precisely why it shouldn't work, and yet there's something genuinely perverse about watching a 31-minute love letter to parliamentary machinery in 1990 when the whole system was already rotting from the inside.
Churchill's observational restraint—letting the page's quiet guide work speak for itself rather than editorializing—positions this squarely in the lineage of structural documentary, where form and institutional subject matter mirror each other with uncommon grace.
The decision to center a young page's perspective rather than the machinery itself creates an elegant constraint: every shot of legislative process is filtered through wonder and discovery, which transforms what could be dry bureaucracy into something almost tender.