Director Yung Chang’s feature debut Up the Yangtze is a rarity—a film that portrays a vastly complex reality made immediate and personal through an artist’s sensibility. Monumental, yet intimate.
The Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s is one of the most startling stories in Canadian history, one of high drama and adventure played out in the gorgeous frozen landscape of the North. City of Gold, Colin Low and Wolf Koenig’s beautifully rendered documentary, captures the frenzy, cruelty and derring-do of this onslaught of 100,000
In 1886, a U.S. Supreme Court decision held that corporations were entitled to the same rights and protections enjoyed by flesh-and-blood individuals. Thanks to this kind of legal fancy footwork, which shielded shareholders from personal liability for corporations’ actions, businesses would grow into mighty multinationals that would wield more power than most governments. But if
Arguably the first Canadian music video, The Ballad of Crowfoot sees Mi’kmaq singersongwriter Willie Dunn setting his own epic protest ballad to visuals. In Dunn’s song, the biography of legendary 19th-century Blackfoot chief Crowfoot provides a vantage point to look at the tribulations of the Indigenous peoples of North America: land stolen, buffalo killed, whiskey, war,
It is certainly one of the most justified criticisms of the NFB’s feminist Studio D that it took so long for the unit to produce a feature-length film about the lives of queer women. Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman met on a 1988 shoot and, recalls Fernie, “we got to talking about films about lesbians, and
In Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, Alanis Obomsawin skillfully presents the tense situation behind the lines with compassion towards the Indigenous people while not demonising the police and armed forces.
Why Terre Nash's NFB Oscar winner If You Love this Planet is one of Canada's essential documentaries for its portrait of the harms of nuclear war.
The girls just go crazy for Canuck crooner Paul Anka in Lonely Boy. Drawing upon the observational practices of the NFB’s Candid Eye series and appearing within the global movement of cinema verité, Lonely Boy documents the transition of a pop idol into a nightclub performer.
Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes opens with a cinematic coup. An eight-minute tracking shot slowly sweeps across a factory floor in China.
s the first Vietnam documentary of its kind, Beryl Fox's The Mills of the Gods inevitably met a divisive reaction, yet the impact of her work can be measured in the prizes it won and its influence on the Vietnam movies to come, both fact and fiction.