Cattle Country

This short documentary offers a portrait of life on a cattle ranch, for both its human and animal inhabitants. Featuring sprightly music by folk singer Pete Seeger and narration by theatre actress Frances Hyland, the film is shot through the seasons on a large Canadian cattle ranch near Kamloops, British Columbia. With hundreds of cows and calves on the ranch, there’s no shortage of work to be done: soil cultivation and crop maintenance are taken care of by seasonal ranch hands while the resident cowboys—“anxious guardians”—brand and breed their bovine charges.

This short documentary introduces a new breed of cowboy: one with a Master's degree in Business Administration. Although this new cowboy is gradually phasing out the old romantic image, in British Columbia's beautiful Nicola Valley a few cowpunchers still remember the good old days and, when they can, relive them. This is a look at the cowboy's life in transition as the demands of the marketplace streamline the cattle industry.

This documentary follows two country veterinarians through their daily rounds, from sterile clinic to farm paddock. Thirty thousand miles of house calls a year is routine for doctors Vic Demetrick and Reg Maidment, whose patients include just about any creature that hops, trots, swims or flies.

Viewer Advisory: This film contains scenes of animal slaughter..

This feature documentary tells the story of a young couple’s year-long experiment in raising their own meat. On the abandoned farm property they just bought, they decide that if they’re going to eat meat, they should raise it themselves. Over 4 seasons, they get to know the animals, discover their personalities, treat them with respect and eventually slaughter them. Animals takes us deep into the heart of the animal-human relationship, with all its contradictions.

This short documentary offers a look at Stampede Week in Calgary and the show’s main performers – the cowboys and their horses. After the herds come thundering in, the focus shifts to one cowboy in particular, and we follow him as he travels from rodeo to rodeo, always reaching for the grand prize on the back of a bucking bronco.

This short documentary illustrates rural French Canadian life in the early 1940s. The film follows Alexis Tremblay and his family through the busy autumn days as they bring in the harvest and help with bread baking and soap making. Winter sees the children revelling in outdoor sports while the women are busy with their weaving, and, with the coming of spring young and old alike repair to the fields once more to plough the earth in preparation for another season of varied crops. One of the first NFB films to be produced, directed, written and shot by women.

Julian Biggs interviews Dr. Don Fisher, head of pomology at the Summerland Experimental Farm in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. Dr. Fisher describes the cultivation and maintenance of several strains of the dwarf apple tree.

Western ballads played on guitar are the only sounds used in this romantic portrait of a cowboy. He rounds up wild horses, lassoing one of the high-spirited animals in the corral, and then goes for a glorious plunging ride across the spectacular Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta.

In 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.

Boys from the city get a taste of the life of a cowboy. The film catches the enthusiasm and humour of this Alberta riding holiday in which 'tenderfeet' quickly become horsemen, ride herd, help brand calves and, best of all, spend a night in the teepees of the Kainai (Blood).

This short documentary profiles a community engaged in developing sustainable living methods, including food production and small-scale solar and wind technology, on a farm in Massachusetts in the 1970s. Well before sustainability was a mainstream concern, these prescient innovators attempted to create a vision of a greener, kinder world. "Think small," say the New Alchemists. "Look what thinking big has done."