
Steel Town Down
Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario built its identity around one employer: the steel mill that anchored generations of jobs. VICE News travels there to document what happened after that industry collapsed, talking to residents who watched the plant that defined their town shrink or shut down entirely. The film follows people navigating what came after the layoffs, from empty storefronts to the search for new work in a city that never had much of an economy outside steel. Interviews with locals carry the story, tracking how a single industry's decline reshapes daily life long after the headlines about it fade. It is a short, focused piece of reporting on one town standing in for a broader pattern across the industrial Midwest and Canada's own rust belt, where the mills that built entire communities have gone quiet.