The Trapline
2025 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Andrea Wing
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
When she's yelling into the moonlight wondering why she does this, Sydney van Loon must remind herself that it's simply because in trapping, she's found her purpose.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A documentary about traplines sounds like exactly the kind of earnest nature content everyone's seen before, but Wing's got something stranger buried in here — the film treats the act of checking traps as a kind of intimate ritual, almost ceremonial, which quietly unsettles the whole pastoral thing.
The formal rigor here is in the restraint: Wing allows the landscape and the rhythms of the work to speak without editorial flourish, positioning the film in a lineage of observational documentary that trusts duration and repetition as their own argument.
The singular choice is sound — Wing layers the ambient forest against the specific metallic *click* and creak of trap mechanisms in a way that makes you feel the protagonist's muscle memory before you understand what they're doing, transforming a technical action into something almost meditative.