Regina Telebus
1973 · 19m · Canada
Directed by Rex Tasker
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Regina experiments with a dial-a-bus system intended to combine transit affordability with taxi-like convenience. The report explains how passengers could request flexible, door-to-destination rides in 1973.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A bureaucratic fever dream disguised as transit documentation—Tasker treats urban planning like experimental theater, turning a dial-a-bus pitch into something genuinely unsettling about control and convenience. Everyone else sees a curiosity; Felix sees the subversion.
Tasker's measured archival approach to speculative infrastructure sits beautifully in the lineage of structural documentary and the National Film Board's systematic investigation of governance—the formal precision of the presentation *is* the argument about rationality and urban design.
The choice to let the dial-a-bus system explain itself through its own promotional logic, without ironic narration or deconstruction, creates a disquieting gap where skepticism should live—that restraint, that single decision to trust the material's own strangeness, makes it work.