The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson's Bay Company
1972 · 42m · Canada
Directed by Martin Defalco, Willie Dunn
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
As the Hudson's Bay Company marks its 300th anniversary with official celebrations, Indigenous people describe how its fur-trade empire and stores shaped and harmed their lives.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to celebrate the HBC's anniversary, so Defalco and Dunn just... flip the entire ledger upside down and let Indigenous voices do the accounting—it's a formal rebuke disguised as testimony, and it's the kind of subversive move that feels obvious only after you've seen it.
A measured, archival intelligence at work here: the film positions itself against the official record with the precision of a counter-argument, letting oral history and lived experience accumulate like entries in a ledger that the institution tried to erase—this is how documentary becomes historiography.
The choice to structure it as a ledger—a merchant's accounting system—and then populate it entirely with human cost rather than profit margins is where the whole film pivots; it's one formal decision that reframes what documentation itself can mean.