Trees Are a Crop
1950 · 23m · Canada
Directed by Jack Bordelay
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Farmer Joe Kelly, who once lost out by selling his trees for wholesale cutting, learns on his father's farm to practise selective cutting, marketing his woodlot for a steadier income while keeping it sustainable.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1950 NFB doc about sustainable forestry sounds like the most anesthetizing premise imaginable — and yet there's something genuinely perverse about how earnestly it treats timber management as moral philosophy, which is either profound or a prank I'm still not sure I get.
Bordelay's film sits squarely in the Canadian documentary tradition of the postwar NFB, using the particular (one farmer's woodlot) to articulate a philosophy of stewardship that feels both formally restrained and quietly urgent — a model of how instructional cinema can achieve genuine contemplative weight.
The film's real trick is making the invisible visible: the choice to linger on the *uncut* trees, letting silence do the work of arguing against clear-cutting, means everything happens in what you don't see rather than what you do.