Riding the Tornado
1986 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Bob Lower
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Alberta's oil-fuelled expansion and sudden collapse become a cautionary example as Newfoundland weighs a possible offshore boom in the mid-1980s, with winners who exited early contrasted against those ruined by the downturn.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lower refuses the obvious morality play and instead lets the boom-bust cycle speak for itself—no sermonizing, just the quiet devastation of people who mistook timing for wisdom, which is way more unsettling than it has any right to be.
A rigorous essay film that situates itself squarely in the tradition of Canadian documentary inquiry, using Alberta's oil collapse as a formal device to examine provincial economic policy with the measured precision of Grierson-era nonfiction, updated for the 1980s.
The film's masterstroke is letting the *winners* justify their exits in their own words—that choice to privilege their unguarded rationales over narrator commentary transforms what could be a straightforward cautionary tale into something genuinely destabilizing about self-deception.