Innovative documentary shows zinc mining town being ‘erased’

The Web documentary “Welcome to Pine Point” by combining video, photographs, text, music and narration and then blurring the boundaries among them, pushes storytelling and documentary filmmaking into new territory.

“Welcome to Pine Point” is the story of a small lead and zinc mining town in Canada’s Northwest Territories that physically disappeared from the map after the mines closed in 1988. The first buildings were erected in 1952 and at its peak it had 1,200 inhabitants.

The Post Gazette reports “Most industry towns, after losing their purpose, attempt resurrections, reinventions, or just slowly wither away. In Pine Point, they decided to erase the town from the face of the Earth,” reads a block of text, which is made more poignant by being superimposed on video of a figure skater on ice during the town’s final winter carnival.

Click here to see the web documentary “Welcome to Pine Point”

The Pine Point Revisited website is here.

Image is a still from a video documentary given to town residents by the mining company on closure, from the chapter Ends and Odds