Tudor King

This short fiction is adapted from a collection of short stories by Canadian author Hugh Hood. A young father in Montreal buys a red kite for his daughter. This mildly impulsive act leads to encounters with strangers that cause him to entertain existential questions. He becomes preoccupied with understanding the purpose and meaning of life, until finally, a special moment with his family seems to give him the closure he seeks.

Based on a short story by Sinclair Ross, this short film recalls rural life on the Prairies in the 1930s. In the film a farmer's young son, sent to town to hire a man for the harvest, readily accepts when an itinerant trumpet player, down on his luck, begs a chance. He is hardly the kind of man the boy's father had in mind, but that night his trumpet speaks from the shadows and everyone pauses to listen.

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

This short film offers a picturesque tour through the maple-wooded hills alongside Québec's Lièvre River in autumn to the accompaniment of acclaimed poet Archibald Lampman’s poems including Morning on the Lièvre. Trees are ablaze with colour, and their splendor is reflected in the mirrored surfaces of the water, offering a glimpse of the landscape Lampman knew so well through the poet’s eyes and words. Lampman’s poem is read by broadcaster and poet George Whalley, with accompanying score by composer Eldon Rathburn.

The Pedlar is a dramatic film based on the short story by W.D. Valgardson, A Place of One's Own. Tired of the rootless, lonely existence of a travelling merchant, a man searches for a place to settle down, and someone to share his life.

This feature-length fiction, originally produced as a television miniseries and based on the novel Nuages sur les brûlés by Hervé Biron, explores the colonization of northern Quebec during the Depression-era 1930s. These historical dramas relive the toil, hardship and unexpected rewards of the pioneer. Folk singer Félix Leclerc appears in each episode. Part I: Encounters with the inhospitable wilderness while clearing a townsite. Part II: Struggles for leadership; log cabins are built and the women arrive. Part III: The dangers of frontier life: forest fire, accident, anxiety about bankruptcy, lack of tools, hard labour. Part IV: Big steps forward: the curé brings in teachers and is in turn presented with a new, though rough-hewn, church.

This short film is a dramatization of Canadian author W.O. Mitchell's penetrating story about the racial prejudice encountered by a Polish immigrant farmer in a rural Saskatchewan community. Presented with the incisiveness characteristic of Mitchell's Jake and the Kid radio series, this film story employs homespun events of a farming community to lay bare some universal truths about the unthinking discrimination practiced against a man who is different from his English-speaking fellow farmers.

In this short documentary, Canadian poet Andrew Suknaski introduces us to Wood Mountain, the south central Saskatchewan village he calls home. In between musings on his poetry, which is tinged with nostalgia and the vast loneliness of the plains, the poet discusses the area’s multicultural background and Native heritage, as well as the customs and stories of these various ethnic groups.

This animated short film is an interpretation of Earle Birney's poem “Trawna Tuh Belvul by Knayjim Psifik.” Using finely crafted cut-out animation, the film retells a memorable experience of the journey from Toronto to Belleville, Ontario.

This film recreates the true story of Tom Sukanen, an eccentric Finnish immigrant who homesteaded in Saskatchewan in the 1920s and 1930s. Sukanen spent ten years building and moving overland a huge iron ship that was to carry him back to his native Finland. The ship never reached water.

This short animated film follows Antoine, a young boy fascinated by his mysterious neighbour, a man rumoured to have once been a big game hunter. Antoine is eager to learn about hunting, but the lesson he learns from the wise older man is not at all what he had expected: Antoine is left with a profound reverence for life. The film is based on Jacques Godbout’s book Une leçon de chasse, which was nominated for a 1997 Governor General's Award for children's literature.

An animated film based on Stephen Leacock's witty account of a young man's first brush with banking. When he tries to make his deposit, he is so intimidated by the institution that nothing he says comes out right.