Strike in Town
1955 · 37m · Canada
Directed by Leslie McFarlane
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, tense
In a one-industry town, negotiations between a furniture factory and its union deadlock into a strike that neither side wanted but neither could stop.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1955 doc-drama about labor deadlock sounds like the most boilerplate social-realist premise ever, but McFarlane refuses to pick a side—the film's genuine oddness is watching both strikers and management get trapped in their own logic, which is the opposite of the agitprop you'd expect.
This is precisely the kind of formally considered mid-century documentary that belongs in a lineage from Grierson through to later structural work—McFarlane's restraint in not editorializing the strike, letting the deadlock unfold through observation and pacing, marks it as craft-aware work that repays close viewing.
The decision to hold on silences and empty factory spaces rather than cut to talking heads is what makes this sing—it's a small, specific choice about negative space that transforms a period labor film into something genuinely tense and disorienting.