Don't Let the Angels Fall

In this feature drama, a wife takes the courageous decision to leave her 5 children at home and accompany her husband on his yearly summer tour as an itinerant photographer. This despite housework, routine and 14 years of marriage having created a mutual indifference. They travel through a turn-of-the-century countryside of narrow lanes and old-time weddings, but most importantly, to an eventual rediscovery of each other.

This fictional feature follows a twenty-something man who is struggling to define his position in the world in early adulthood. He has left their parents' home but still has not made an home of his own. Our protagonist’s alienation is palpable; for him life is a game, not because he chooses to make it so, but because he is unable to make anything more of it. But for those who befriend him and eventually turn him loose again, his game is not enough. Filmed in Montreal, this classic by Don Owen (Nobody Waved Good-bye) explores the time-worn rite of passage of finding oneself in a world not built for rakish playfulness.

This award-winning feature-length drama from the 1960s tells the story of a teenage boy who rebels against his parents' middle-class goals and conventions.

For more background information on this film, please visit the NFB.ca blog.

A feature drama about a girl torn between two cultures, the English-speaking community of Vancouver where she grew up and the French-speaking Québec where the film opens. Her uncertainty extends to her lovers, one from Vancouver who wants to take her home and the other from Québec who would like to continue their pleasant, if inconclusive affair. The settings show a Québec winter and British Columbia spring.

Guilty of loving life! A dramatization of an actual court case in turn-of-the-century Québec. A lively, outgoing woman is accused of murdering her husband in collaboration with the hired hand. The townspeople do not appreciate her robust personality and the proceedings in court degenerate to a judgment of her character. Filled with stunning visual imagery, this feature film captures the spirit of the time and place. Particularly useful for those interested in history, law or women's issues. With English subtitles.

In this feature film, an engineer from Paris flies to Montreal (on Air Canada Flight YUL 871), partly on business, partly in search of parents displaced by World War II, and partly because of the prevailing restlessness of the age. He achieves little that is conclusive, but in the short time between his arrival and departure he has a love affair, enjoys a flight over Montreal and the Expo pavillions, and is adopted by a little girl.

For more background info on this film, visit the NFB.ca blog.

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

This short fiction tells the story of Eddie, a young man who "borrows" a motorbike parked in front of a store and takes his girl for a spin—a brash decision with disastrous and alienating consequences. The film, a commentary on a society that often offers youth little purpose or sense of accomplishment, is a play-by-play exploration of the clash between young people's impulsiveness and society's need for law and order.

There was a time when the general store was the crossroads of life, a place where a boy could learn all he needed for the way ahead--especially when his uncle was the storekeeper, and also the undertaker, and the nephew often called upon to lend a hand. This film recalls such a store in a village in the asbestos mining area of Quebec in the early 1940s. The film presents a hundred-and-one vignettes of village life--all the bitter-sweet nostalgia with which a man might remember the events that thrust him into manhood. The action takes place on Christmas Eve--the one time of the year when the mine closed its doors, and the store bustled with humanity. For a few hours the villagers could forget their poverty and converge on the store for gossip and revelry. In the midst of it all was Uncle Antoine, customary ebullience and ribald humour whetted by occasional recourse to the gin bottle, and always somewhere in the background, his nephew Jacques taking it all in. But for Jacques this night was to bring sudden initiation into some of the harsher, cruder realities of life, even acquaintance with tragedy and death. Mon oncle Antoine is about a Quebec that makes no headlines but reflects the whole of life, the ebb and flow of hope and despair that might be in anyone's memory.

Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Robin Spry, Prologue was the first Canadian film to screen at the Venice Film Festival. Set and filmed during the sixties, this fiction feature tells the story of a young Montrealer who edits an underground newspaper with help from his female friend and a draft dodger from the United States. Two rival philosophies of dissenting youth become evident in the choices they make: militant protest vs. communal retreat. The film includes some seminal archival footage of a speech by legendary anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman and bloody rioting during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

A chronicle of daily life that lays bare people’s dependency on consumer society, which reduces and degrades individuals via its very structures—and which, the filmmaker argues, must be challenged and transformed. There is no story as such—that is, no conventional episodic structure or plot, but rather a sequence of seven tableaux depicting the life of a couple and its gradual disintegration, set against the socio-economic backdrop of 1969, a world in which seduction is ever-present.