The Forest in Crisis
1981 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Susan Murgatroyd
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Northern Ontario's forests are shown to be far from inexhaustible as use and misuse strain the resource. Government and industry search for sustainable methods in an industry that supports one in ten Canadian jobs.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1981 doc about forest sustainability sounds like the most anesthetic policy brief imaginable, but Murgatroyd somehow makes the contradiction between extraction and stewardship genuinely unsettling—which means either the film has teeth or I'm losing my edge.
Murgatroyd positions this within the documentary tradition of resource critique (Grierson lineage through economic urgency), and the restraint of the formal approach—letting the landscape and testimony accumulate weight rather than manipulate—feels prescient for a film interrogating whose interests get centered in 'sustainability.'
The choice to let the film breathe with long forest sequences instead of cutting to talking heads or montage reveals how much patience and visual grammar matter; that pacing decision alone transforms what could've been a corporate explainer into something that actually sits with the problem.