Harold Crooks, the filmmaker who follows what power refuses to count

The question Harold Crooks keeps asking is not complicated, but no one in power wants to answer it. Where does the money go? What does the corporation owe, and to whom? His career is a sustained attempt to make the ledger legible — to follow the numbers that governments and multinationals prefer to keep in shadow.

Crooks came to documentary filmmaking sideways, through journalism. He spent the 1980s and early 1990s covering environmental stories in Canada, the kind of beat that requires patience and an appetite for institutional opacity. His books from that period — Dirty Business (1983) and Giants of Garbage (1993) — read like preparatory work for the films that followed: deep dives into industries that moved through the world as if they had no obligation to account for it.

His early film work came with The Champagne Safari (1995). But it was The Corporation (2003) that established his signature concern. Co-writing the narration with director Mark Achbar, Crooks helped turn a legal argument about corporate personhood into a piece of popular inquiry — the film examined the publicly traded corporation as a psychopathic entity, systematically unmoved by the harm it causes. The Corporation went on to win audience awards at Sundance and TIFF and became one of the most-screened documentaries of its decade, the kind of film that spreads through university lecture halls not because professors assign it but because students find it.

The film’s central argument was that corporations externalize costs — that the true price of industrial productivity is paid by workers, communities, and governments rather than shareholders. Arguing a thing, however, is not the same as tracing it in operation. Crooks’ subsequent work kept drilling into that gap.

Surviving Progress, co-directed with Mathieu Roy and premiering at TIFF 2011, widened the lens — not just corporations but civilization itself, the paradox of development that generates underdevelopment, growth that produces collapse. It played CPH:DOX and IDFA and confirmed that Crooks was operating in the political-economy documentary space with sustained rigor rather than polemical heat.

The Price We Pay (2014), his first solo feature-length documentary as director, was the work that most precisely announced his method. The film traced tax avoidance — the labyrinthine offshore structures that allow multinationals to declare profits in Luxembourg and losses everywhere else. What Crooks documented was not just greed but architecture: the legal geometry of avoidance, the way that the global financial system had been quietly redesigned so that the entities most dependent on public goods — roads, courts, educated workforces — had developed the most sophisticated tools for not contributing to them. The Vancouver Film Critics Circle named it Best Canadian Documentary of 2014. The New York Times called it a critic’s pick.

His writing credit on Shannon Walsh’s The Gig Is Up (2021) continued the investigation from a different altitude: not the top of the corporate hierarchy but its bottom edge, where app-based platforms had created a labor market that looked like freedom and functioned like exploitation. Workers from Uber, Amazon, and Deliveroo spoke for themselves. The film screened at Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, and IDFA.

The sharpest version of the critical question about Crooks’ body of work is whether his films change anything. The Corporation became a staple of university curricula, but the legal architecture it criticized has expanded. Tax avoidance has grown more sophisticated since The Price We Pay, not less. This is not an argument against the films — documentary rarely produces direct policy change — but it does define the particular weight of his enterprise: clear-eyed documentation of a problem that the problem-producing system has no incentive to solve.

The film he co-directed most recently, The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons (2022), made with art critic Judd Tully over nine years of production, is the strangest work of his career. It profiles an elusive African American conceptual artist who has refused interviews for decades and whose work deliberately evades the mechanisms of documentation and market valuation. Hammons, who emerged from Watts-era Los Angeles in the 1960s to become one of the most consequential figures in contemporary American art, is precisely the kind of subject who does not appear in any ledger. The film — which premiered at Sheffield DocFest and received its U.S. theatrical release at Film Forum in New York in May 2023 — builds its portrait through animation, archival footage, and a score featuring Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Orchestra. It won the IDA Award for Best Music Score.

What connects Hammons to corporate tax havens is not immediately obvious. What Crooks seems to find in both is a similar structure: something powerful insisting on its right to remain unaccountable. Whether the subject is a multinational’s offshore subsidiary or an artist’s deliberate resistance to being read, the filmmaker’s task is the same — to build a record from what the subject prefers not to leave behind. For Harold Crooks, that has been thirty years of work, and it is not finished.

Tags: The Melt Goes On Forever, documentary films, Harold Crooks, Mathieu Roy, Surviving Progress, The Corporation

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