Where You Goin' Company Town?
1975 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Stephen W. Dewar
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: provocative, tense
In Trail, British Columbia, where Cominco's lead-zinc smelter employs 90 percent of workers, metal workers challenge paternalistic management over health risks and union representation. The debate over participation escalates into a violent strike as labour and management clash.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1975 labour doc sounds like the most predictable agit-prop you could film, but Dewar shoots it like a pressure cooker without editorializing—lets the paternalism speak for itself, which somehow makes it weirder and more unsettling than any voiceover screed would.
This sits squarely in the lineage of NFB social documentaries, but with a formal rigor that refuses easy sides; the escalation from debate to violence is structured with almost classical tension, and Dewar's restraint in the frame is precisely what makes the conflict so legible and urgent.
The real move here is how Dewar lets the *sound* of the smelter—that industrial roar—do the ideological work; it's always there, always present, and by the time the strike turns violent, you realize the film has been arguing about who controls that noise the entire time.