The World of One in Five
1969 · 27m · Canada
Directed by James Carney
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Across Canada, the one in five citizens living at subsistence level — children, elders, the sick and drifters — face poor housing, food, schooling and health as the certainties of daily life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A '69 social documentary about poverty—sounds like every other well-meaning institutional film, and it probably is; Carney's playing it straight when the real provocation would've been to show us *why* we ignore it.
Carney situates this within the lineage of Canadian documentary activism and the NFB's social-realist tradition, and the formal choice to let subsistence itself become the subject—not the people, but the *condition*—shows real curatorial restraint and rigor.
The decision to frame poverty as a statistical abstraction ('one in five') rather than through individual testimony creates distance that somehow makes it more unbearable; that structural choice, not sentiment, is what makes this land.