An industrial platform taken apart at sea and a Nunavut community gathering food from the land might seem like unrelated subjects. Both ask what happens when the relationship between people, resources and place becomes difficult to sustain. Two National Film Board of Canada films scheduled for Toronto's Planet in Focus International Environmental Film Festival later this month make that connection in very different ways.
The NFB announced on October 2 that Karl Lemieux's Platforms will make its world premiere at the festival, which runs October 20 to 25, 2026, at the Paradise Theatre. The 20-minute experimental short documents the dismantling of offshore oil and gas installations on the Scottish coast. Lemieux filmed on 16 mm and used photochemical processes to manipulate the images, while Swedish artist BJ Nilsen developed the soundscape. The announcement describes an audiovisual encounter with the physical work involved in ending an industrial installation's life. The film's announced subject is decommissioning, not a claim that the process has already been completed everywhere or that its environmental consequences are settled.
Making its Toronto premiere is Nirilaurta: Let Us Eat, a 52-minute documentary by Inuk filmmaker Malaya Qaunirq Chapman. Set in Taloyoak, Nunavut, it follows a community confronting food insecurity amid high grocery prices and expensive access to hunting and travel. Land-based food gathering is presented not simply as an alternative shopping arrangement, but as part of the knowledge, relationships and cultural practices that support families and communities. The documentary had its world premiere at Montreal's International First Peoples Festival in August, so the upcoming Toronto presentation is a regional premiere rather than a first public screening.
The contrast makes these screenings interesting together. Platforms examines what remains when a system built to extract resources reaches its final industrial stages. Nirilaurta looks at people working to maintain ways of living with the land despite the economic pressures of present-day food systems. One uses the sound and texture of experimental filmmaking to examine machinery. The other locates environmental questions within personal experience, kinship and Inuit knowledge. Neither has to be reduced to a simple message about the environment for its cultural significance to be clear.
Both also illustrate the range of what public filmmaking can preserve. An image of offshore equipment being dismantled may become a document of how a particular era of industrial infrastructure ended. A documentary about land-based food practices can preserve the perspectives of people who are actively practising and adapting those traditions. The latter deserves particular care. The NFB's announcement describes the community's experience, but the people and their own voices, rather than an outsider's generalization about Arctic life, remain central to understanding the film.
The screenings haven't taken place as of this report. The National Film Board has confirmed their inclusion in the festival programme, but audience response and critical reception cannot yet be assessed. For Canadians who won't be at the Paradise Theatre, their planned premieres are still worth watching because they bring the question of environmental change into forms that conventional policy debates rarely accommodate: texture, memory, craft, lived experience and the ways a place sounds and feels.
Primary source: National Film Board of Canada, October 2, 2026 announcement.