Our Town Faro
2004 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Mitch Miyagawa, David Oppenheim
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
After Faro, Yukon, loses its mine and faces becoming a ghost town, mining engineer turned mayor Murray Hampton works to bring the small wilderness community back to life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A documentary about a small-town mayor trying to save his dying mining community sounds like the most earnest, consensus pick imaginable—which is exactly why I'm surprised it works; there's something genuinely unsettling about watching someone fight for a place that might simply deserve to become a ghost town.
Miyagawa and Oppenheim locate this in a lineage of North American documentary portraiture—the intimate civic study—and execute it with real restraint; the 8-minute form becomes a meditation on futility and hope held in perfect, unresolved tension.
The decision to follow Hampton's face rather than the town's infrastructure is what elevates this from dutiful local news into something tender—the filmmakers trust a single human's quiet determination to carry the entire emotional argument.