The Skiff of Renald and Thomas
1980 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Bernard Gosselin
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, humorous
On Île-aux-Coudres in the St Lawrence River, five craftsmen join forces to construct a traditional skiff without any blueprint, their communal labour revealing skill, humour and a pre-industrial way of life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 57-minute documentary about five guys building a boat with no blueprint sounds like the opposite of subversive until you realize Gosselin is quietly dismantling the entire mythology of progress — this is a film about obsolescence that somehow makes it look like the only sane way to live.
Gosselin positions this within a lineage of observational documentary that honors craft as philosophy; the decision to withhold a blueprint becomes formal rigor, forcing the film's rhythm to match the workers' hands rather than a predetermined narrative arc.
The entire film hinges on one choice: letting the camera simply *stay* with the labour, refusing to editorialize or accelerate, so that a single moment of laughter between two craftsmen contains more humanity than a dozen talking-head testimonials could deliver.