Rusting World
1980 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Laurent Coderre
Genres: drama, experimental, satire
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
In a barren, lifeless landscape, two rival groups emerge and fight over a single gleaming object. The wordless confrontation becomes an allegory about greed and a world in decay.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1980 NFB wordless fable about resource conflict reads like every other allegory about greed—competent, sure, but it's playing the hand everyone expects rather than folding and walking away.
Coderre's formal restraint—letting the gleaming object and barren mise-en-scène carry the ideological weight without dialogue—places this firmly in the structural cinema lineage, with the economy of a parable that earns its silence through deliberate compositional choices.
The choice to make the object *gleaming* in a rusted world is almost everything here; that single contrast does the allegorical work that could have taken dialogue, and the decision to hold on the landscape longer than comfort allows transforms what could be didactic into something haunting.