The Taxi Driver
1954 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Louis Portugais
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
This portrait follows Montreal taxi driver Gerry Lane through a series of fares as he carries passengers to destinations across the city.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1954 NFB docuseries about a taxi driver sounds like the most aggressively *safe* premise imaginable — and yet Portugais somehow makes the mundane refuse to cooperate, turning passenger vignettes into something that feels genuinely unmoored from conventional doc rhythm.
Portugais positions this modest portrait within the foundational NFB tradition of social observation, where the everyday becomes a formal study in duration, editing, and the accumulation of human detail — this is cinema that knows exactly what it inherits.
The brilliance here lives in the decision to let silence and dead time breathe between fares; most emerging filmmakers would fill that space, but Portugais understood that the gap between passengers *is* the character, and that restraint is what makes an 11-minute taxi ride feel revelatory.