The Ungrateful Land: Roch Carrier Remembers Ste-Justine
1972 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Cynthia Scott
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Novelist and playwright Roch Carrier recalls his native village of Ste-Justine, Quebec, where fields ringed with rock testify to the grinding labour endured by his father and grandfather before him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Scott makes a period essay film about *remembering* feel like contraband—the rocks themselves become a refusal, a document of resistance that won't let nostalgia off easy.
A formally precise work in the essay documentary tradition, where Scott's measured pacing and the symbolic weight of fieldwork create the kind of layered meditation that reveals itself on second viewing; Carrier's voice anchors a film deeply aware of its lineage to the Quebec documentary movement.
The decision to let the stones—those accumulated traces of labour—carry the narrative weight rather than dramatize Carrier's memory is what makes this work; it's the restraint that transforms a biographical recollection into something architectural and true.