This Borrowed Land
1984 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Bonnie Kreps
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Women farmers of British Columbia's Peace River Valley speak out against a proposed hydro-electric dam that would convert their rich farmland to non-food uses, asking whether enough land will remain for their children to grow food.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the earnest environmental doc, but Kreps refuses the obvious catharsis—instead she lets these farmers sit in the problem, turning what could've been a manifesto into something genuinely unsettling about complicity and survival.
A formally sophisticated essay film that inherits the best of 1980s Canadian documentary tradition while expanding it: the layering of testimony, landscape, and temporal anxiety creates a meditation on stewardship that deepens with each formal choice.
The film's restraint is its superpower—Kreps trusts the women's words and the land itself to carry the weight, and that decision to strip away manipulation lets a single farmer's pause, or a held shot of soil, do more work than any score could.