The Price of Duty
1995 · 47m · Canada
Directed by Garth Pritchard
Genres: biography, documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Combat engineer Mark Isfeld clears mines in former Yugoslavia alongside fellow Canadian peacekeepers. The film honors his service and examines the painstaking, high-risk demining work that ultimately claims his life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A reverent war doc that does exactly what you'd expect it to do—honor a fallen peacekeeper, examine duty, fade to black. It's competent and moving, sure, but there's nothing here that makes me want to argue about it or question the form itself.
A precisely constructed elegy that understands its debt to the Canadian documentary tradition and to the formal language of memorial cinema; the restraint in how Pritchard allows Mark Isfeld's life and death to speak through patient observation and intimate detail is the mark of a filmmaker aware of what cinema owes to those it witnesses.
The film's power lives in its refusal to sentimentalize—there's a single choice to let the demining work itself become the portrait, the repetitive, methodical clearing shots doing more emotional labor than any talking head ever could, and that decision transforms what could be a conventional tribute into something that breathes.