A documentary by John Gianvito. Unrated. Plays Monday and Tuesday, February 18 and 19, and Wednesday and Thursday, February 27 and 28, at the Vancity Theatre

Was America’s “heartland” always a place consumed by fear of reason, flag-burning, and gay marriage? No friggin’ way! That answer is more quietly, yet forcefully, put forward by Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, an oddly enthralling meditation, without narration, on the U.S.’s upstart spirit.

The one-hour effort, which won 2007’s award for best experimental film from the U.S. National Society of Film Critics, declares itself inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It is, indeed, a visual companion to the populist view of our troubled neighbour as a place of perennial insurgency. Certainly, the term grassroots applies here, as writer-director-editor John Gianvito (a Massachusetts film professor) fixes his travelling camera on gravestones marking the material remains of rebels, martyrs, warriors, and innocent victims of a 250-year class war.

Everyone from Thomas Paine to Sojourner Truth, Eugene Debs, and César Chávez is noted here, usually in appropriately silent surroundings, and sometimes with headstones in sad disrepair. There are several First Nations freedom fighters, like Red Jacket and Sitting Bull, but by far the greatest number of honorees are early 20th-century workers and their families who were killed by hired goons for the crime of organizing unions or marching on a picket line.

Between these essentially static images are interludes with old-growth trees and fields of waving grass, invoking Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan. There’s also the sense that a nation’s history is in the air its citizens breathe—if they know how to recognize it. It’s less clear what Gianvito has in mind with his small snippets of rough animation, presumably depicting backroom deals made by corporate greedheads masquerading as patriots. Too bad they aren’t history.