Put the Centres in Chocolates?

The scouts

A four-minute how-it's-made short about chocolate centres sounds like the safest, most anodyne premise possible — and yet Don White somehow makes industrial tedium *mesmerizing* by treating it with deadpan reverence, which is either the most obvious joke or genuinely subversive depending on your mood.

White's film sits comfortably in the NFB's pedagogical documentary tradition while elevating what could be rote factory footage into something formally considered — the pacing, the framing choices, the whimsical restraint — suggest a filmmaker aware of how to make process itself into visual poetry.

The singular choice here is the tonal key: by refusing to wink at the viewer and instead treating chocolate-centre placement with complete earnest wonder, White unlocks something that cheaper, snarkier hands would've buried under irony.