Through Conflict to Negotiation
1968 · 45m · Canada
Directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein, Peter Pearson
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tense
In Rochester, New York, a community action group guided by organizer Saul Alinsky challenges the city's biggest employer over corporate responsibility and jobs for minority workers.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to canonize Alinsky as the radical hero, but Klein and Pearson actually catch something messier — the grinding, unglamorous work of negotiation that doesn't fit the insurgent mythology, which is exactly why most people sleep on this doc.
A rigorous observational piece from the NFB's golden era that tracks the formal architecture of power itself; Klein and Pearson's restraint in letting the conflict unfold without editorial pleading feels increasingly rare and necessary.
The decision to stay with the closed-door meetings rather than cut away to crowd reactions is what makes this sing — it forces you to read faces and tension in real time, no safety net, which transforms a standard community-organizing doc into something almost unbearably intimate.