Way of the Hunter
2018 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Robert Moberg
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
In British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest, former hunter Robert Moberg reflects on a life spent pursuing game. Having set aside his rifle for a camera, he reconsiders his bond with the wilderness and what he hopes comes next.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A guy trades his gun for a camera and gets all reverent about it—sounds like the most self-congratulatory environmental redemption arc imaginable, except Moberg actually seems to be interrogating that narrative rather than wallowing in it, which is the only reason this isn't unwatchable.
Moberg's formal restraint—the way he lets silence and landscape do the philosophical work rather than overlaying it with easy sentiment—places this in a lineage of Canadian nature documentaries that trust the viewer's intelligence, and the transition from hunter to witness becomes a genuine meditation on complicity and witness.
The decision to keep Moberg's voice thin and almost reluctant on the soundtrack, letting the forest breathe around his confession, is what transforms this from a character study into something genuinely unsettling—you feel his uncertainty rather than his certainty, which is everything.