Ruth and Harriet: Two Women of the Peace
1973 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Barbara Greene
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
In northern Alberta's Peace River country, Ruth and Harriet run households and homesteads with determined self-reliance in their thirties. River, bush, and wildlife shape a rural way of life presented as both demanding and deeply rooted.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a 1973 NFB doc that refuses the heroic pioneer mythos — just two women existing in radical ordinariness, which is somehow more subversive than any manifesto could be, though I suspect most people will find it simply quiet.
Greene's observational rigor and her refusal to sentimentalize rural labor place this squarely in the documentary tradition of social witness; the formal restraint — letting landscape and daily work speak — positions it as a considered counterpoint to more rhetorical nonfiction of its era.
The decision to let silence and the sound of the river carry weight rather than voiceover or score transforms what could've been a straightforward homestead portrait into something genuinely intimate and unsentimental.