Potatoes
1976 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Robert Lang
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
North American agriculture shifts from family operations toward corporate farming, bringing economic pressure and personal hardship to the people whose livelihoods depend on the land.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1976 doc about agricultural economics sounds like the most consensus-safe premise imaginable, but Lang refuses to aestheticize the crisis—there's a deliberate refusal of the sentimental that most filmmakers would've leaned into, and that coldness is genuinely unsettling.
This sits squarely in the lineage of direct cinema and social documentary that defined the NFB's institutional mission, with the formal restraint and observational rigor that allows economic devastation to speak through accumulated detail rather than rhetoric.
The film's power hinges on a single recurring choice—the camera holds on empty fields and shut barn doors just a beat too long—which transforms documentary observation into genuine elegy without ever naming the emotion.