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Agriculture Industries (13)
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Bacon, The FilmHugo Latulippe 2002 51 minSeveral years ago, large-scale hog producers and their political allies in Quebec decided to branch out into international markets. But bacon, like everything else, has its price. Bacon, the Film asks whether we have properly measured the social and environmental impacts of this proliferation of huge hog operations. The soil is already showing signs of sterility. Rivers are contaminated. Water, the very symbol of life, has itself become a hazard in some communities. The situation could be spinning out of control. Abandoned by the state, citizens groups are making their voices heard and taking back democracy. An unexpected grain of sand in a machine well oiled by neo-liberal dogma, they are fighting to keep society on a human scale. -
COVID 19: The Future of FoodJérémie Battaglia 2020 12 minHow are you adapting to the pandemic? That’s the question Jérémie Battaglia and Vali Fugulin asked Canadian small and medium-sized business owners in April 2020 as part of the Pivot project led in partnership with the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative. Out of these discussions, one major theme emerged — how COVID-19 has affected the eating habits of Canadians. Interest in local products and cooking exploded during the lockdown, but was it just a fad? Six months later, as the second wave was sweeping over the country, Jérémie wanted to continue the conversation with two of the business owners he met, restaurant owner Lil MacPherson and farmer Dave Kranenburg. Both have long advocated for the importance of making the agri-food industry more responsive and local. On a video-conference call, they reflect on the changes in behaviour we’re seeing and wonder if we might be witnessing a long-term paradigm shift in our relationship with food.
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Death of a SkylineBryan Smith 2003 41 minA bulldozer tears into the side of a wooden grain elevator. The magnificent prairie landmark crumples to the ground. Once, more than 5,000 Alberta grain elevators graced the skyline. Today they're being razed to make way for modern concrete structures. Are these "prairie cathedrals" being destroyed due to obsolescence or corporate profit? In this film, a lively cast of characters reveals the story of these disappearing landmarks. The citizens of Mayerthorpe, Alberta fight to save their elevator as demolition day approaches. A Montana couple, Bruce and Barbara Selyem, race to photograph elevators across the continent before they are ripped down. Pete Kirk salvages grain-worn wood from demolition sites to build furniture and recycle a piece of prairie history. With archival film clips, interviews and dramatic footage of tumbling grain elevators, Death of a Skyline explores the history and significance of these familiar prairie structures. Wooden grain elevators have been at the heart of North America's economic, cultural and physical landscape for more than a century. As they continue to fall, will all that remains be memories of a vanishing way of life?
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Eye Witness No. 401952 11 minThe Eye Witness series is a collection of short documentaries featuring Canadian news stories from the 1940s and '50s. This segment includes Prairie Harbour: The Port of Flowing Grain, a look at the lakehead cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, funnelling centres for western grain on its way to world markets. In Modern Miracle: Surgery is Safe, the appendectomy of patient Henry Brown demonstrates the advances in modern medicine. Co-Op Carpenters: Home-Made Community illustrates the principles behind the cooperative housing program for veterans in Carleton Heights near Ottawa.
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Eye Witness No. 01947 11 minIn this edition of the Eye Witness series from 1947, we track the first shipment of milk heading out to Europe's starving children, witness millions of bushels of grain being loaded onto a boat on Hudson's Baby headed for Britain, and, in BC, we watch acres of seed being grown, tested, and loaded for the gardens of the world.
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The Fight for True FarmingEve Lamont 2005 1 h 29 minIn this documentary, crop and animal farmers in Quebec, the Canadian West, the US Northeast and France offer solutions to the social and environmental scourges of factory farming. Driven by the forces of globalization, rampant agribusiness is harming the environmemt and threatening the survival of farms. The proliferation of GMO crops is a further threat to biodiversity as well as to farmers' autonomy. In Europe as well as North America, a current of resistance bringing together farmers and consumers insists that it is possible - indeed imperative - to grow food differently.
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Grain ElevatorCharles Konowal 1981 15 minThis documentary short is a visual portrait of “Prairie Sentinels,” the vertical grain elevators that once dotted the Canadian Prairies. Surveying an old diesel elevator’s day-to-day operations, this film is a simple, honest vignette on the distinctive wooden structures that would eventually become a symbol of the Prairie provinces.
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Grain Handling in CanadaGuy L. Coté 1955 24 minThis film details the functions of the Board of Grain Commissioners, under the provisions of the Canada Grain Act. Wheat is followed from its delivery and inspection at a prairie elevator until its final inspection as it is loaded onto ships at the Lakehead terminal elevators.
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Maritime MontageJulian Biggs & Rollo Gamble 1955 30 minThere are two subjects in this film--the cooperative movement stemming from St. Francis-Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and a rural fair at Egmont Bay, Prince Edward Island.
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MoundsTom Jacques & Nicolas Paquet 2020 3 minIMPORTANT: For the optimal experience, please use headphones and turn up the volume.
This playful documentary by Nicolas Paquet and Tom Jacques stages the monumental dance of the peat vacuum harvester, a gigantic industrial machine conceived in Rivière-du-Loup. On top of a dramatic soundtrack composed with invented instruments, workers are busy forming large mounds, which are seen in all their aesthetic splendor through the eyes of the two creators. A nod to the NFB film De la tourbe et du restant, shot in the peat bogs of the Bas-Saint-Laurent during the 1970s.
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PotatoesRobert Lang 1976 27 minThis documentary deals with the gradual shift from the family farm to corporation-run farms, with all the ensuing problems and personal hardship. It is an incisive evaluation of what is happening in North American and worldwide agriculture today.
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A Time to RiseAnand Patwardhan & Jim Monro 1982 39 minOn April 6, 1980, the Canadian Farmworkers Union came into existence. This film documents the conditions among Chinese and East Indian immigrant workers in British Columbia that provoked the formation of the union, and the response of growers and labour contractors to the threat of unionization. Made over a period of two years, the film is eloquent testimony to the progress of the workers' movement from the first stirrings of militancy to the energetic canvassing of union members.
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We're Here to StayIan McLaren 1974 27 minThis short documentary examines how 7 farm families in Lestock, Saskatchewan, have pooled their resources so that rising operating costs will not drive them off their land. By pooling their land, their equipment, their livestock, and farming as a cooperative, they are able to live as they choose, to maintain their standard of living, and even to have some spare time left over to enjoy. An engaging look at a novel approach to big-scale farming.
