This short documentary invites us to Göteborg, Sweden, where the 23rd world championship match for builders of free-flight model aircraft was held in July 1971. The film follows the successful flights and the failures, as competitors, including a Canadian team, attempt to get their fragile handmade craft airborne by whatever means.
This feature-length documentary tells the story of two very different men brought together by New Brunswick's decision to hand the management of millions of acres of Crown land to six multinationals. One man is an Acadian woodlot owner retired after nearly 40 years in a pulp mill; the other is a painter and winemaker with homes in France and New Brunswick.
The activitists travel to Finland, home of UPM-Kymmene, one of the largest licence holders of New Brunswick Crown lands, to urge company officials to practise responsible forestry. They also go head-to-head with the provincial government to secure a new community-based forestry policy that is environmentally sustainable and produces more jobs than the highly mechanized techniques used today.
During World War II Norwegian patriots struck at Germany from the rear, linking Canada, the United States and Britain with Soviet Russia. Norwegian resources around the world were mobilized, and at Canadian training stations Norwegian airmen forged a lasting friendship between the two countries. Includes footage from the British film All for Norway.
A penetrating look at how difficult it is for the northern countries--Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark--to remain neutral, caught as they are between the two superpowers. All but Canada were neutral before World War II. Today, only Sweden has not joined a military alliance, but with American and Soviet military forces in the northern seas, even its lone neutrality is at risk. Archival footage from the two world wars, animated maps, and interviews illuminate the historical shaping of each country's stance on neutrality and approach to its own defense, and how these positions work for and against the countries. The film's thesis is that a non-aligned north is the key to separating the superpowers and attaining world peace.
Torill Kove's grandmother often told her stories. One in particular revolved around ironing shirts for the King of Norway. And what if that intriguing detail was just the tip of the iceberg? Perhaps she also worked covertly in the Norwegian resistance... Maybe she even spearheaded a campaign to create an unprecedented brand of guerrilla warfare! Treating history as a fabric woven from personal stories, animator Torill Kove follows a thread of family history, embroidering it with playful twists along the way. In My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts, she imaginatively renders her grandmother's life and work in Oslo, especially during World War II. Sharp and whimsical, her story combines her grandmother's tales with historical events and fantasy, and shows how a cherished anecdote can come to acquire a mythical status. My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts is about an ordinary woman with a revolutionary instinct. With sharp humour it explores storytelling, myth-making and the important contributions that are possible through the most humble means.
A film critic of one of Sweden's daily newspapers says of this film by Martin Duckworth, "Never before have I seen a film that so intensely interpreted the experience of Swedish surroundings ... an "atmosphere film" in which all the expression is in the pictures."
This is a very unusual and original film, breaking new ground in filmmaking methods as well as in ways of viewing things. All the usual facts about Sweden have been given a hundred times over, and often in better forms than film can offer, but in this film the director has launched into a form of cinematic observation and commentary that offers an entirely new experience of things Swedish.
This feature documentary tells the story of 2 Inuit communities of the circumpolar north—one on Canada’s Baffin Island, the other in Northwest Greenland—that are linked by a migration led by an intrepid shaman. Navarana, an Inughuit elder and descendant of the shaman, draws inspiration and hope from the ties that still bind the 2 communities to face the consequences of rapid social and environmental change.