Where Do We Go from Here?
1973 · 22m · Canada
Directed by James Carney
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Using Toronto as its case study, this film examines how urban transportation actually works and the political and economic conflicts beneath it. Rather than settling the debate, it foregrounds the questions cities must answer about moving people.
Picked by Margot
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A 1973 essay doc about transit logistics sounds like the most boring thing imaginable—until you realize Carney's actually interrogating whether cities can even ask the right questions, let alone answer them, which is genuinely radical for a film masquerading as policy analysis.
This is precisely the kind of measured, intellectually rigorous essay film that understands documentary as argument rather than exposition—Carney situates the transportation question in a lineage of structural cinema while maintaining the curatorial restraint to let competing claims breathe rather than resolve.
The decision to use Toronto as a case study rather than a conclusion—to foreground contradictions instead of smoothing them into narrative—is the move that transforms what could've been a dry municipal primer into something genuinely probing about how cities actually function.