Children from Overseas

This short documentary is part of the Canada Carries On series of morale-boosting wartime propaganda films. In Home Front, the various WWII-era social contributions of women are highlighted. From medicine to industrial labour to hospitality, education and domesticity, the service these women provided to their country is lauded.

This short documentary was made near the end of World War II to introduce the subject of the need for labour-management committees. Government and industry in Canada were looking to a post-war era where production would have to be converted to peacetime. The objective was to improve productivity by reducing absenteeism, workplace accidents and keeping morale high.

This short newsreel highlights the battles faced by both Axis and Ally powers over the minds of the world through propaganda and information. Part of the World in Action series, this film includes footage of Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler.

This short film looks at the plans made at Dumbarton Oaks in 1945 for a renewed international organization devoted to world peace - the United Nations.

In this short film made during World War II, a teacher explains how children in Russia, China and occupied Europe are going hungry and how Canada is helping to remedy the situation.

This feature documentary examines its own genre, which has often been called Canada's national art form. Released in the year of the NFB's 75th birthday, Shameless Propaganda is filmmaker Robert Lower's take on the boldest and most compelling propaganda effort in our history (1939-1945), in which founding NFB Commissioner John Grierson saw the documentary as a "hammer to shape society". All 500 of the films produced by the NFB until 1945 are distilled here for the essence of their message to Canadians. Using only these films and still photos from that era, Lower recreates the picture of Canada they gave us and looks in it for the Canada we know today. What he finds is by turns enlightening, entertaining, and unexpectedly disturbing.

Made at the end of WWII, this short film shows scenes of food queues, hunger riots and famine in liberated Europe, pointing out the political danger that lies in starvation conditions. Causes of food shortages and measures taken by the Allies to solve these problems are described.

This short film from WWII focuses on the increasingly important roles women occupy on the various war fronts. In England, their more active jobs include ferrying planes from factory to airfield and operating anti-aircraft guns. In Russia, they are fighting on the front lines as well as acting as parachute nurses, army doctors and technicians. In Canada women have joined active service auxiliaries, and thousands labour day and night in factories turning out the tools of war. From the Canada Carries On series.

This wartime publicity trailer by Norman McLaren focuses on wartime inflation and the role of price control. Single-frame animation is used with pen drawings made directly on 35mm film stock. Music is by Louis Applebaum, a leading composer and advocate for the arts in Canada.

This short film, part of The World in Action series, looks at Soviet foreign policy from 1917 through World War II. It considers the historical and political imperatives and the value of the Soviet Union as an ally.

This 1940s wartime newsreel shows the food shortage in Nazi-occupied countries that have been forced to hand over their farm produce to Germany, leaving their own populations hungry. Part of the Canada Carries On series.