Pleasure Faire
1972 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Kris Paterson
Genres: documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
In British Columbia, countercultural artisans and musicians gather for a medieval-inspired youth fair filled with handmade crafts, folk performance, dancing and deliberately noncommercial celebration.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to romanticize the '70s counterculture, but this film actually *lets* the moment breathe instead of performing its own nostalgia—which means it commits the heresy of being genuinely uncool, and somehow that makes it unmissable.
Paterson's 13 minutes operate in direct lineage with cinema-vérité observation of communal ritual, situating itself between documentary earnestness and Roeg-like formal attention to folk performance as pure cinema.
The decision to let the handheld camera move with the crowd rather than frame it anthropologically—to make the viewer a participant rather than recorder—reframes what 'documentary' can do with nothing but presence.