Taxi!
1982 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Barry Greenwald
Genres: documentary
Tones: humorous
Filmed day and night in the city, this documentary observes taxi drivers, fleet operators, and dispatchers as they handle passengers, parcels, and unexpected emergencies with humour and anonymity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1982 documentary about taxi drivers sounds like the most boring assignment possible, but Greenwald's refusal to impose narrative or sentiment—just letting dispatch, chaos, and human dignity speak for themselves—is actually a subversive middle finger to every feel-good doc that came before it.
Taxi! sits comfortably in the observational documentary lineage of Wiseman and the NFB's own tradition of urban portraiture, using the taxi system as a perfect formal constraint: every passenger, every call, every shift becomes a complete narrative unit, nested and accumulating with the precision of a well-edited feature.
The decision to stay inside the dispatch office as much as on the street—letting radio chatter, logistics, and the invisible labor of routing become the film's rhythm—transforms what could be anecdotal vignettes into a single organism where every voice matters equally.