IRECENTLY RETIRED from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), having worked there for 37 and a half years. For the last 15 of those years, I was the English collection curator, a post where I was responsible for selecting the films to be added and featured on the NFB’s online streaming site. During my time at this venerable institution, I estimate that I viewed approximately 8,500 of the total 13,000 films produced there. It is a mixture of mostly documentary, fiction, and animated films that were made as far back as the 1930s. In that batch of films, I saw a lot of excellent productions, some average ones, and others that were just plain bad. This article focuses on ten excellent documentaries—little gems that, perhaps, did not receive enough exposure or were popular at the time and have long since been forgotten.
These films are presented in no particular order. All of them are available to stream for free on the NFB’s online platform (nfb.ca) and, in many cases, on the NFB’s YouTube page (youtube.com/nfb).
The Defender
dir. Stephen Low, 1988
I recently saw in the news that Canada has finally chosen the fighter jet that will replace the aging CF-18s the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) has flown since 1982. Well, back in the late 1970s, Bob Diemert of Carman, Manitoba had a dream: to build the world’s next great fighter plane and sell it to the RCAF. The problem was that he had no money and no backing from any
