What in the World Is Water?
1967 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Martin Defalco
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, sensual
Water is presented as a tireless worker that shapes land, moves earth and rock, and carries nourishment to plants and other life. From rainfall to Niagara Falls, the educational film celebrates both the usefulness and the beauty of water in motion.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1967 NFB educational film about water sounds like the opposite of subversive until you realize Defalco treats H2O like a protagonist with agency and dignity—the sensual, contemplative approach transforms what could've been a rote civics lesson into something that actually argues for the animate world, which is weirder than it sounds.
Defalco positions himself squarely in the Canadian documentary lineage of poetic observation (Grierson's legacy, filtered through a visual formalism that refuses didacticism), and the formal restraint—letting water's own motion become the editing rhythm—shows a curator's understanding of how beauty and education need not be enemies.
The choice to let water's movement dictate the pacing rather than impose a narrator's authority over it is what elevates this from serviceable educational work: one structural commitment—letting the subject's own rhythm be the film's rhythm—and suddenly you're watching something that feels alive and made by someone who trusted the material enough to listen.