Untouched and Pure
1970 · 46m · Canada
Directed by Mort Ransen, Christopher Cordeaux, Martin Duckworth
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative
An unconventional observational portrait of Sweden that moves past familiar facts about the country to offer a fresh, cinematic way of seeing Swedish life and landscapes.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Three NFB documentarians in 1970 making a film about Sweden that explicitly rejects the Sweden everyone already knows—that's a genuine middle finger to consensus, and it lands harder because they actually earn it through form rather than just attitude.
This sits perfectly in the lineage of essayistic observation and structural experimentation that defines the NFB's documentary practice; the restraint to look past the obvious and rebuild vision through cinematic language is precisely the kind of considered, lineage-aware work that programs itself.
The gambit here is refusing the easy ethnographic frame and betting everything on how you *see*—that choice to rebuild perception rather than catalog facts is what transforms an archival portrait into something that still breathes nearly fifty years later.