Sun, Wind and Wood
1978 · 24m · Canada
Directed by Dorothy Todd Henaut
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
People counter high energy costs with wood, sun and wind, including the Ark, a bio-shelter using only natural systems to provide a family with housing, heat, food and electricity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1978 doc about alternative energy systems sounds like PBS boilerplate, but Henaut's refusal to sensationalize the Ark—treating it as a lived, ordinary experiment rather than utopian spectacle—is quietly subversive; she trusts the premise without needing to prove anything.
Henaut's formal restraint and observational rigor anchor this film in a lineage of structural documentary that values witness over argument; the contemplative pacing and naturalistic framing reflect a curatorial confidence in form that feels increasingly rare in advocacy work.
The decision to let the family's daily rhythms and the shelter's material systems speak for themselves—no voice-over, no manufactured conflict—hinges everything on Henaut's compositional choices and what she omits, which is where the film's modest budget becomes an asset rather than a constraint.