Water for the Prairies
1951 · 18m · Canada
Directed by Lawrence Cherry
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
This 1950s film examines efforts by Alberta and federal authorities to protect prairie water supplies flowing from the Rockies as water tables fell, timber was cut and glaciers receded.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straightforward public-works doc about water management in 1950s Alberta—exactly the kind of earnest institutional film that makes most people's eyes glaze over, which is precisely why it's fascinating as a historical artifact of how government saw itself before everything got so slick and mediated.
Cherry's film sits beautifully within the NFB's documentary tradition of the postwar period, using the prairie landscape and careful archival assembly to elevate a technical policy matter into something approaching the elegiac—this is craft in service of collective memory.
The real move here is how the film lets landscape *be* the argument: those vast aerial shots of the Rockies and receding glaciers do the climate work without a single voice-over exhortation, trusting the viewer's eye to read what's draining away.