Shining Mountains - Once and Future Wild
2005 · 47m · Canada
Directed by Guy Clarkson
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the Rockies, businesses, governments and residents join the Yellowstone to Yukon initiative to connect wildlife corridors for grizzly, wolf and caribou, learning from people who live closely with the land.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A well-intentioned conservation doc that plays it completely straight—no formal surprises, no narrative reversals, just stakeholders nodding at each other over maps. It's the kind of film that wins approval from everyone and sticks with no one.
Clarkson situates this film squarely in the tradition of earnest North American environmental documentary, but the restraint is the accomplishment: how the editing moves between bureaucratic meetings and wilderness footage without condescension, treating both registers as equally serious. That's formal discipline.
The tender passages work because Clarkson chooses to hold on people's faces—residents, biologists, local officials—in genuine moments of uncertainty rather than conviction, which is the single choice that keeps this from becoming propaganda.