Waterfowl - A Resource in Danger
1964 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Don Virgo
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
On the Prairie wetlands, vast flocks of ducks and other waterfowl depend on shrinking breeding grounds for survival. As drainage and cultivation erase those marshes, the film warns that a prized wildlife resource is at risk.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a conservation PSA dressed up in National Film Board earnestness—exactly the kind of well-intentioned, morally transparent documentary that makes contrarians roll their eyes, though I'll admit Virgo's refusal to sensationalize the prairie collapse has a quiet subversiveness to it.
A masterclass in the Canadian documentary tradition of patient observation and formal restraint; Virgo trusts the landscape and the slow erasure of it to carry the argument, letting composition and montage do what narration could cheapen—this is how institutional filmmaking should sound.
The real move here is the decision to hold on empty water, on absence itself, rather than cutting away to talking heads or archival panic; that negative space *is* the resource dying, and it's a single formal choice that transforms advocacy into something genuinely unsettling.