The Metal Foundry (1984)

Short documentaries can be awkward things to programme into any kind of film-watching project. They arrive without fanfare, they leave before you have properly settled in, and more often than not they exist in the archival margins where print quality and audio preservation are very much an afterthought. The Metal Foundry, directed by Bike Johnstone and released in 1984, is precisely that sort of film: an 18-minute documentary co-produced between France and Papua New Guinea, modest in scope and clearly made with limited resources, that records a quietly unusual moment in the economic life of a young nation. Papua New Guinea had only achieved independence from Australian administration in 1975, less than a decade before this film was shot, and the country was still feeling its way through the practicalities of self-governance at every level, from national politics down to the factory floor.

The subject itself is genuinely interesting in a low-key way. A small metal foundry in Lae, one of Papua New Guinea's main industrial cities, found itself without its owner after the man returned to Australia, leaving the business in a kind of limbo. Rather than simply folding, the workers kept it running, with some support from the provincial government, turning it into an early experiment in cooperative management. That is the kind of story that tends to appeal to a certain strain of documentary filmmaking popular in the early 1980s, particularly in French production circles, where films concerned with labour, post-colonial transition, and community-led economics were a recognisable thread. In that sense The Metal Foundry sits alongside other French-backed documentaries from the period that trained their cameras on societies navigating questions of ownership and independence, however unglamorous the setting. For a sense of how French cinema has approached similarly off-the-beaten-track subjects, it is worth looking at what I made of Little by Little (1970), another French production with an ethnographic curiosity at its core, or Candomblé in Togo (1972), a documentary of similar vintage that also captures a specific cultural moment with limited means.

Details about the production are sparse: the studio behind the film is not recorded, the cast (such as it is in a documentary of this kind) is unknown, and Bike Johnstone does not appear to have a substantial wider filmography that has been widely catalogued. What we can say is that the film is very short, running to exactly 18 minutes, and that surviving prints appear to be few and poorly preserved. That is not unusual for documentary shorts from this era and this part of the world, but it does shape the experience of watching it in the present day considerably. Nom Tèw (2009), another documentary I have covered on this blog, gives a useful point of comparison for how films from smaller or less commercially prominent territories can arrive to the viewer in variable condition, with context often hard to fill in after the fact.

A-Z World Movie Tour. Papua New Guinea What an annoying short film. It's 18 minutes long and the version I found was the only one and it was English overturned which was incredibly difficult to hear. The picture quality of woeful and the overdub didn't help. It's a story about a metal factory that the owner abandoned that the Papau New Guineans took over and continue to service orders and handle the day to day. Can't really recommend it to be honest

That frustration is one I recognise from other digs through the more obscure corners of world cinema. When the technical presentation is this poor, it becomes genuinely difficult to assess the film on its merits, which is a shame because the subject matter here is the sort of thing that deserves a decent watch rather than an endurance test. For me, the idea of workers keeping a foundry alive through collective effort, in a country only a few years out from colonial administration, is worth somebody's attention. It just probably needed a better surviving print to get it. Some films you tick off and move on from, and this is one of them.

Rating: ★  | Year: 1984  | Watched: 2025-08-12

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)