Discourses on Value

The title is borrowed from Machiavelli — not the Machiavelli of popular reputation, but the political theorist who invented a method. His Discourses on Livy took the documented historical record of Rome and extracted living principles from it. Not nostalgia for the past, but a practical toolkit derived from careful attention to what actually happened and why.

That method is what this project applies to the question of value.

Every culture that has ever built anything durable has had to decide what was worth spending on, what was worth preserving, and how to tell the difference. These decisions were never abstract. They were made in specific materials — gold, silver, grain, land, labour, stone — and they shaped everything from what got built to who got to build it. The physical record of those decisions is vast, scattered across archives and traditions on every continent, and largely uncomparable because each civilization kept its books in its own terms.

Rubedo's database attempts to make that record comparable by reducing it to a common unit. The Discourses documentaries do the opposite. Each one enters a single culture on its own terms and investigates how that society understood what it was doing when it spent, preserved, and exchanged what mattered to it. What did they treat as wealth? What did they build to protect it? What did the answers cost them, and what did the answers make possible?

There are 57 co-production treaties between Canada and countries around the world. Each treaty makes it legally and financially possible for a Canadian production to be treated as local in both territories. Each Discourses documentary is produced through one of these treaties, with a collaborating filmmaker in that territory. The infrastructure that makes the film possible is the same infrastructure the film is investigating — bilateral coordination across cultures with different ideas about value. The medium is the method.

This is not a series with a showrunner and a production bible. It is a studio's long-term commitment to a single question explored through 57 independent collaborations. Each documentary will bear the perspective of its local collaborator as much as the studio's. What holds them together is the question, not the answer — and the conviction that a question this old, asked across this many cultures simultaneously, will surface patterns that no single investigation could reveal.

We are looking for filmmakers. Not for hired hands, but for collaborators with their own relationship to the territory and their own curiosity about how value has worked there. If you are a documentary filmmaker with a connection to any of Canada's co-production treaty territories and the question interests you, we want to hear from you.