The Great Electrical Revolution
1990 · 23m · Canada
Directed by Larry Bauman
Genres: comedy, family, historical
In Depression-era Saskatchewan, a Moose Jaw family descended from an Irish grandfather who dreamed of a quiet estate revolts in comic fashion when the power company disables their beloved Marconi radio, sparking a working-class standoff.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Depression-era family standoff over a radio sounds like exactly the kind of middlebrow Canadiana that everyone's supposed to find charming—and Bauman somehow makes it work anyway, which is almost insulting to my contrarian instincts.
Bauman constructs a formally deliberate comedy that knows its debts to both working-class narrative tradition and the particular cadence of NFB humanism; the film's architecture—balancing whimsy with genuine class politics across 23 minutes—marks it as the work of a filmmaker conscious of his lineage.
The film's entire emotional engine hinges on treating that Marconi radio with the same gravity as a character, and the restraint in how Bauman frames it—never overselling the object, trusting the family's relationship to it—is what elevates what could've been cute into something genuinely poignant.