Winner of the Genie for Best Documentary and nominated for Sundance's Grand Jury Prize, Jennifer Baichwal's 2006 Manufactured Landscapes is essential Canadian cinema. It also marks the beginning of the director's ongoing collaboration with photographer Ed Burtynsky. In the first of a soon-to-be completed trilogy of documentaries with the photographer, Baichwal trains her camera on Burtynsky as he travels to China. There, using his signature large-scale photography, he documents the rapidly urbanizing, sometimes decaying and always altered landscapes that bear the permanent marks of human civilization. Shot by Peter Mettler, Manufactured Landscapes is visually stunning. But aesthetics don't trump politics, as both Baichwal and Burtynsky force us to examine our own impact on the planet, asking the viewer to "see our world a little differently." Kiva Reardon