Riding the Great Whale
1994 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Diane Beaudry
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A documentary examines conflict over Quebec's James Bay hydroelectric development, contrasting claims of engineering achievement with Cree and Inuit accounts of environmental destruction and threats to their homelands.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1994 doc that refuses to pick a side and actually *respects* contradiction—hydroelectric infrastructure as both genuine achievement and genuine catastrophe—is the kind of both/and premise that makes consensus scouts itch, which is exactly why it works.
Beaudry's formal architecture holds two irreconcilable truths in frame simultaneously, a documentary tradition descended from Flaherty and the NFB's own lineage of ethical witness; the restraint in not resolving the contradiction is what gives it curatorial weight.
The decision to let Cree and Inuit testimony speak without voiceover mediation—trusting archive footage and direct address over narrator authority—is the specific structural choice that transforms this from advocacy doc into something that actually earns its complexity.