Wilf
1968 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Robert Nichol
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Filmed in the Ontario countryside, this documentary follows farmers whose livelihoods no longer measure up to rising competition and costs, weighing whether a new trade and a move to town offer a better future despite all they would leave behind.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A '68 doc about farmers choosing between tradition and survival should be agitprop, but Nichol refuses the easy anger—he just watches them decide, which is somehow more unsettling than any manifesto could be.
Nichol's restraint is the entire film: no narrator, no score manipulation, just the weight of economic history settling into a farmhouse, situating itself squarely in the Canadian documentary tradition of patient observation as moral inquiry.
The decision to let silence do the work—to cut away just before a farmer speaks, or to hold on a hand reaching for a cup—transforms what could be PBS earnestness into something that actually breaks you.