The Grasslands Project - Population 21
2016 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Scott Parker
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan, has lost its four grain elevators, railway, hotel, and school, leaving a community hall that still crowds a few weekends a year. The handful who remain explain why the village is still home.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's obsessed with apocalypse narratives these days, but Parker just... sits with it—no score, no dread, just people refusing to leave. It's the anti-dramatic take on rural collapse, which is exactly why it shouldn't work but somehow does.
A quietly masterful essay film that positions itself in a lineage of Canadian documentary observation—formal restraint, respect for duration, and the kind of formal patience that lets absence (the missing elevators, the empty school) become as present as the voices still rooted there.
The genius move here is Parker's refusal to cut away: he lets silences sit and lets the landscape dominate the frame, so when a resident finally speaks, their choice to *stay* lands with actual weight instead of sentiment.