The Annanacks
1964 · 29m · Canada
Directed by René Bonnière
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
In 1959 the Annanack family and other Inuit at George River in northern Québec form the first successful Inuit co-operative, building a joint venture with a sawmill, fish-freezing plant and boat-building work.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1964 NFB doc about Inuit cooperative economics sounds like institutional pablum, but Bonnière shoots it with such austere restraint that the real subversion is in what he *doesn't* explain—watch it and you're doing the ideological heavy lifting yourself.
Bonnière's formal command is immaculate here: the documentary situates itself squarely in the NFB's humanist tradition while achieving something rarer, a film that lets economic self-determination breathe through pure observational cinema rather than didactic narration.
The genius move is the sound design—ambient, almost impressionistic, letting the work itself (sawing, freezing, building) become the narrative rather than overlaid testimony, which transforms what could be a policy film into something intimate and tactile.