People of the Peace

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.

This documentary short introduces us to Bob Keen, a Northwest legend and self-made millionaire. Bob began his career bulldozing mountain roads with a second-hand caterpillar tractor that gave him his nickname: Catskinner. Now he owns oil land, operates road, water and air transport, flies a plane, drives a chuckwagon, and is listed on the stock exchange. This film profiles a modest man who still likes sitting by a campfire with old cowpuncher pals in the Canadian Rockies.

This documentary short introduces us to The Badlanders, an Alberta band from the Drumheller area. When hard times came to southern Alberta during the 1930s, a generation of young musicians turned to their instruments to lighten the gloom and earn extra money by playing at Saturday night country dances. The film invites you to meet and listen to members of the original band, as well as some members of the younger generation who just don't dig the country music vibe.

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."

This short documentary takes us to St. John's Cathedral Boys' School, at Selkirk, Manitoba, one of the most demanding outdoor schools in North America. As the school can’t accommodate every student wishing to enroll, boys of 13 to 15 years old are put through an initiation tougher than they have ever faced. They paddle canoes through some 500 kilometers of wilderness in 2 weeks, portaging and camping all the way, thereby learning vital outdoor lore, cooperation and self-confidence.

This short 1944 documentary offers a portrait of ranching in the foothills of southern Alberta. Exciting scenes of great herds being rounded up and moved to summer feeding grounds suggest the large scale on which this business is run, while segments on spraying, feeding and shipping illustrate some of the less dramatic jobs involved in bringing Canadian beef to the world's tables.

This 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.

This short documentary tells the story of the first Jewish settlers to Winnipeg, people who fled European persecution at the turn of the century and founded a new community in a Canadian city.

This short documentary focuses on prairie sculptor Joe Fafard. If there's one thing Joe knows, it's cows. He knows the way they tuck in their forelegs to lie down to ruminate and the way a calf romps in the barnyard. He also knows his friends and neighbours in the farming community of Pense, Saskatchewan—and he sculpts them all in clay, as eloquent and quirky miniatures. Joe's work has been exhibited throughout Canada as well as in Paris and New York, and this film offers a glimpse into his process, his aesthetic, and the charming prairie community in which he lives.

At twenty-six, Noel Starblanket was one of the youngest Indigenous chiefs in North America--twice elected chief of the Starblanket Reserve, and also elected vice-president of all-Saskatchewan Indigenous organization. His great-grandfather's advice was to "learn the wit and cunning of the White man." That he did. Here he is seen in action, a chief with a briefcase, working with government officials for grants, running for public office, talking down his opposition, and solving the domestic problems of his reserve.

This short documentary profiles a 1949 meeting of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers in Guelph, Ontario. The IFAP plans to help solve the dire problem of world hunger—a problem sharpened by the birth of 55,000 more human beings, arriving "for breakfast," each day. Delegates emphasize the plight of the many nations who face starvation while others have a surplus of food. The conference challenges the world to succeed at implementing a proposed plan for the fair distribution of food.