Trail Ride
1964 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Ernest Reid
Genres: adventure, documentary, family
Urban youngsters spending a holiday on horseback in Alberta learn ranch skills including herding and calf branding, and they overnight in teepees hosted by members of the Kainai Nation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight-ahead pedagogical doc about city kids learning ranch life—exactly the kind of earnest, consensus-friendly programming that puts me to sleep, even if the cross-cultural framing with the Kainai Nation hosts *should* complicate things more than it actually does.
Reid's 1964 sensibility—the formal restraint in observing both the instruction and the cultural exchange, the whimsical tone that never condescends—situates this squarely in the NFB's humanist documentary tradition, a film that believes in showing rather than explaining the dignity of its subjects.
The decision to let the humor emerge from the kids' genuine incompetence rather than manufacture it through narration or cutting is what grounds this; there's a specificity to how the Kainai hosts are framed as teachers, not spectacle, that a smaller budget actually forces you to get *right*.