Super-Companies
1987 · 56m · Canada
Directed by Boyce Richardson
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Filmed across four continents, this documentary examines multinational corporations that source, manufacture, and sell across borders as a single global market, and how their power reshapes communities whose needs often conflict with corporate interests.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Richardson could've made agitprop, but instead he lets the contradiction breathe—corporations as unstoppable force meeting human specificity across four continents, and he refuses to simplify either side into villain theater. It's more unsettling that way.
A landmark essay film that inherits the tradition of Grierson and the NFB's social-documentary mandate while reinventing it for the age of globalization; the formal rigor of its four-continent structure functions as argument itself, each geography a counter-argument to the last.
The decision to shoot across four distinct communities without narrator guidance—letting spatial and tonal shifts do the work of connecting the argument—transforms what could've been a talking-heads policy film into something that trusts the viewer's intelligence and the edit's architecture completely.