That's the Price
1970 · 40m · Canada
Directed by Michael Scott
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
When an American corporation contracts for millions of tons of coking coal, this documentary follows what happens to the dying British Columbia coal towns of Natal and Michel and weighs industrial growth against its environmental price.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1970 NFB doc that plays it straight—industrial death knell, weigh-the-costs morality play—when the real subversion would've been letting the contradiction breathe without editorial hand-wringing.
Scott's film sits squarely in the tradition of socially conscious Canadian documentary, where formal restraint and observational rigor become the vehicle for structural critique; the mining towns themselves become the archive of a particular historical reckoning.
The film's power lives in a single choice: letting the economic logic of extraction speak through the landscape rather than narrating over it, trusting viewers to feel the weight of those millions of tons without being told how to feel.