The Coldspring Project
1974 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Letarte, Kenneth McCready
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
In Baltimore, a proposed mixed-income housing project on 300 acres beside a wildlife sanctuary becomes a test of town planning, as competing community groups argue over the design and a compromise emerges around architect Moshe Safdie's plans.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1974 doc about suburban planning consensus-building sounds like the opposite of subversive, but Letarte and McCready's refusal to pick a side—treating Safdie's compromise as genuine complexity rather than cop-out—is quietly radical in how it refuses the expected righteousness.
This is curatorial gold: a formally precise document of architectural discourse in its moment, where the filmmakers trust Safdie's modernist vision and community deliberation to speak through careful framing rather than editorial hand-wringing—the kind of period artifact that gets rediscovered and argued about for decades.
The real work here is tonal: by keeping the camera steady and patient while competing visions collide, Letarte and McCready make you *feel* the weight of collective decision-making without a single manipulative cut or swelling score—restraint becomes the entire formal argument.