Trappers of the Sea
1945 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Margaret Perry
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Nova Scotia lobster fisherman Pierre sails out to set his hundred traps, as the film follows the work of hauling and preparing the catch for market, the hazards of bad weather and the role of cooperatives in the industry.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1945 NFB documentary about lobster traps is exactly the kind of thing I'd normally skip—and yet Perry refuses to aestheticize the work, keeps the camera patient and unglamorous, which somehow becomes its own quiet argument against the machinery of industrial fishing.
Perry positions this within the documentary tradition of work cinema, but her restraint—the way she lets the rhythm of hauling and cooperating emerge through observation rather than narration—places her alongside the more rigorous ethnographic filmmakers of the era; it's craft that knows its lineage and honors it.
The decision to shoot the cooperative meetings with the same unflinching attention as the boat work—no intercutting, no dramatic rescue moment—trusts that labor *and* solidarity are visually interesting enough, which is a bold formal choice that makes the economics feel lived rather than explained.