Plenty of Nothing
1982 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Dagmar Gueissaz-Teufel
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Farm wives in Quebec's Richelieu Valley who labour alongside husbands without legal ownership confront divorce risk and financial advice as they press for co-ownership and recognition of their work's value.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1982 doc about farm wives fighting for co-ownership sounds like it should be a TED talk, but Gueissaz-Teufel treats it like a slow-burn provocation—the subversion isn't in the hook, it's in how patiently she lets these women's rage accumulate in the frame.
This is essential cinema vérité in the lineage of direct documentary practice; Gueissaz-Teufel's restraint and formal rigor—letting testimony and labour speak without editorializing—positions it as a landmark work in feminist documentary that still feels architecturally precise.
What makes this land is the decision to embed economic argument inside the texture of daily work itself—the camera stays with hands, with the valley, refusing to separate the politics from the lived grain of it.