Taking Stock
1994 · 47m · Canada
Directed by Nigel Markham
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
This documentary traces the history and collapse of Newfoundland's northwest Atlantic cod fishery, focusing on the people facing an uncertain future and the warnings and economic choices that led to the moratorium.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 47-minute doc about fishery collapse sounds like PBS wallpaper, but Markham refuses the easy grief narrative—instead he interrogates the actual choices, the bureaucratic scaffolding of disaster, which is genuinely perverse in its clarity.
Taking Stock sits squarely in the lineage of socioeconomic documentary inquiry (think *The Corporation*, the NFB's own tradition of political nonfiction), and Markham's formal restraint—letting economic data and human testimony do the arguing—marks it as work aware of its own place in that conversation.
The real lift here is how Markham lets silence and negative space do the heavy lifting: the moments where fishermen *don't* speak, where the camera lingers on empty docks, feel more honest than any voiceover could manage on a documentary budget.