The New Schoolteacher

Woolly's Gift takes youngsters step by step through the making of fabric for Annie's new dress. Students see Annie and her family shear Wooly, a mother sheep, and wash the wool. They see the wool carded, spun into yarn, dyed and woven, how leftover wool was bartered, and the daily activities of a pioneer girl.

This animated film by Martine Chartrand (Black Soul) recounts the friendship between a young Félix Leclerc and Frank Randolph Macpherson, a Jamaican chemical engineer and university graduate who worked for a pulp and paper company. An inveterate jazz fan, Macpherson inspired Leclerc, who wrote a song about the log drives and entitled it “MacPherson” in honour of his friend. Paint-on-glass animation shot with a 35mm camera.

Two well-known Quebec artists (filmmaker Jacques Godbout and playwright René-Daniel Dubois) look at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Whose version of this historic event should prevail? Is history best served by documentary or fiction? We also meet Baron Georges Savarin de Marestan and Andrew Wolfe-Burroughs, direct descendants of Montcalm and Wolfe, both of whom died in the battle that would give birth to Canada and to the province of Quebec. In French with English subtitles.

For Alexander Galt it was the middle of the road, until he saw some hope for his dream of a united Canada. What was he like, this stubborn idealist? How did he measure up to other political strongmen of his time? In this film you sense the personal clashes and the interplay of political ambitions that left their mark on history.

The NFB’s 2nd Academy-Award winning film. In this short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower.

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

This short film tells the story of Lord Elgin, a man’s whose faith in a nation’s right to self-determination was stronger than the threat of the mob or his own fear of failure. Successor to Lord Durham, he established the principles on which Canadian government stands today.

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.

A young man, discharged from the army, returns to his coal town. As he wanders the streets, he sees that life remains much as he left it. He takes a room with a miner who had known his father and who recalls the tragedy of his death in the mines. When the young dischargee attends a union meeting he hears the labourers speak of their relation to the war effort and, realizing the importance of coal to victory, he joins a night shift and goes to work in the mine.

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 very short animation from the Canada Vignettes series illustrates the hardships of voyageurs' lives in the early Canadian fur trade.

Animated drawings illustrate the life and explorations of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Québec City. The film follows Champlain from his first ambitions to map the New World and discover a passage to the sea, to his later dreams for New France.