The Emperor's New Clothes
1995 · 53m · Canada
Directed by Magnus Isacsson
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Workers and families in Canada, the United States, and Mexico describe life before, during, and after the signing of NAFTA. Filmed over three years, the documentary asks who bears the cost when economies compete on cheap labour.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
NAFTA doc sounds like PBS wallpaper, but Isacsson's three-year commitment to letting workers speak their own contradictions — instead of narrating their suffering for them — is genuinely anarchic in the essay-film tradition; it refuses to tell you what to think, which pisses off people who want their politics predigested.
A rigorous interrogation of documentary form itself: by refusing the omniscient voice and instead assembling voices across three national contexts over three years, Isacsson situates himself in the lineage of Wiseman and the Maysles, where form becomes argument, and the film's very structure becomes its most eloquent statement about economic interdependence.
The decision to shoot across three years and three countries without a narrator is bold, but what makes this work is the pacing — how Isacsson lets silences breathe between testimonies, forcing you to hold contradictory truths simultaneously, a formal restraint that does more than any voiceover ever could on a modest budget.