The Queen, the Chef, and the President
1974 · 22m · Canada
Directed by Rex Tasker
Genres: documentary, historical
During Prince Edward Island's centennial, the restored Acadian pioneer village of Mount Carmel prepares to receive Queen Elizabeth II, as residents scramble to make the new restaurant lunch and outdoor entertainment go off without a hitch.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1974 NFB doc about small-town anxiety over a royal visit sounds like the stuffiest premise imaginable—and somehow that's exactly what makes it work, the absurdity of Mount Carmel's scrambling earnestness turning into something genuinely subversive about class and spectacle without needing to wink at the camera.
Tasker captures the ceremonial machinery of state pageantry colliding with lived community experience with the formal precision of early Canadian documentary tradition, the whimsical tone and meticulous framing situating this firmly in the NFB's lineage of sociological observation dressed as gentle comedy.
The choice to let the chaos of the restaurant prep and the anxiety of the residents play out in real time—never cutting away from the fumbling, the genuine stakes—transforms what could be a curiosity piece into something oddly moving about how ordinary people actually experience history.