Some People Have to Suffer
1976 · 42m · Canada
Directed by Christopher Pinney
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Residents of Bridgeview, British Columbia, campaign for sewers first promised in 1953, confronting indifferent authorities and powerful developers through years of meetings and frustration until construction finally begins decades later.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants the scrappy underdog doc, but Pinney does something weirder—he finds the *tedium* of resistance heroic, turns municipal bureaucracy into something genuinely unsettling. Most people would've quit this film after the first meeting.
A rigorous work that positions itself squarely in the observational documentary tradition of the '70s, where patience and accumulated detail become the argument itself; the formal restraint here—letting time and repetition do the work—is what separates this from advocacy filmmaking.
Pinney's single masterstroke is the decision to *stay* through the repetition instead of cutting around it—each identical meeting becomes another layer of the same frustration, and suddenly a small-town sewage story becomes about the grinding weight of institutional indifference.