We're Here to Stay
1974 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Ian McLaren
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Seven farm families in Lestock, Saskatchewan, pool their land, equipment, and livestock to farm cooperatively. By sharing costs and labour they hope to stay on their land, preserve their standard of living, and still have time to enjoy it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A doc about Saskatchewan farmers literally pooling resources sounds like NPR pablum, but McLaren's refusal to sentimentalize or lecture—just watching people make unglamorous decisions together—is genuinely weird in how it trusts the audience to find the politics without being told.
This sits squarely in the tradition of Canadian social documentary, a measured inquiry into collective life that lets form and editing argue what the narration refuses to; the contemplative pacing and structural restraint feel deliberate, situated within a lineage of filmmakers thinking through land and labor.
What locks this together is the decision to let the cooperative's mundane routines—equipment-sharing, schedule-coordination—breathe as their own argument; most films would either dramatize or explicate this, but McLaren's commitment to non-intervention in the editing creates a specificity that cheaper, straighter filmmaking would've flattened.