This short experimental film is composed of snapshot impressions of a European immigrant's first five years in Canada. With humour and discernment, they reveal his reactions to his adopted country, to the environment, and the Canadian manners and customs to which he attempts to adjust. At first everything seems strange—the red brick houses, the glass skyscrapers, cars everywhere, stores stuffed with consumer goods—but gradually our protagonist becomes accustomed to calling the place home.
A warm and lively film, Bekevar Jubilee dips into history to look at a time when the first Hungarian peasants came to settle the plains of Saskatchewan. The film documents the festivities commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Bekevar community, and contrasts it with footage and photographs of the old and new countries at the turn of the century.
Filmmaker Albert Kish revisits Montreal's St Lawrence Boulevard in the '70s. The street, also known as "The Main," is a little Europe with many languages, foods and small courtesies that make a stranger feel at home.
This feature documentary profiles the brave Canadians who fought in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. To save Spain's constitutionally elected government from the threat of a fascist dictatorship (which eventually prevailed), over 40,000 volunteers from around the world fought in Spain, and 1200 of those were the Canadians of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. More than half of them never returned. This respectful, emotional and historically rich film is committed to the memory of those who truly believed in the cause of the Spanish Republic.
This documentary short is a portrait of Canadian photographer William Notman. Photography was still in its infancy when he opened his first studio in Montreal in the late 1850s. He rapidly turned his art, and a budding technology, into a highly successful business. Within 5 years he was appointed Photographer to the Queen. Not content with doing mere portraiture, he saw photography as a means of documenting history. With the use of props in his studio, composite photographs, and calling on his background as a trained artist, Notman immortalized the people and places of Canada.
This short documentary is about newcomers to Canada and what they eat. Funny, mouth-watering and visually delectable, it takes us into the specialty food shops where the ingredients are bought, and into the homes where the food is prepared and served in the traditional way.
This short film serves as a poem-on-film about the coming of the machine age on the eve of World War I. Images and sounds combine to recreate a bygone era of scratchy phonograph records, faded photographs, hand-cranked movie cameras, staccato Morse telegraph messages, and rhythmic steam pumps. Machines of every description were shaping peoples' lives and changing them more rapidly than at any other time in history.
Using stunning footage of the fortress and a re-creation of the battle of 1745, this documentary brings to life the siege and fall of Louisbourg, a turning point in North American history. Located on Cape Breton, in what is now Nova Scotia, Louisbourg was the greatest French fortress in North America and a key military stronghold. Once thought impregnable, it fell in a matter of weeks when in 1745, merchants from New England raised a force of 4,000 men and set out to take it.
This feature documentary follows up on 2 important NFB documentaries that captured the turbulent year of 1967, a time when social and cultural revolution, as well as generational change, were on everyone’s mind. The first, Christopher’s Movie Matinée, followed the travels of 14 Toronto teenagers over the course of the summer, while the second, Flowers on a One-way Street, documented the conflict between the hippies of the day and Toronto City Council, over the future of the Yorkville neighbourhood, then Canada's counter-culture capital. More than 2 decades later, the filmmakers have sought out some of the films' participants, not as an exercise in nostalgia but to discover what traces remain in the lives of those who most deeply felt the impact of the '60s
The Fortress of Louisbourg, a historic landmark on the Atlantic shore of Cape Breton Island, was originally built by King Louis XV to protect French possessions in the New World during the French colonial era. Its restoration is considered to be the biggest archaeological dig in North America. This film gives a detailed account of what was involved in the reconstruction and refurbishing.