Spotlight
Wondering which films to watch? Spotlight presents thematically grouped, must see films, hand-picked by Fandor's curators.
Hot Stuff
The End of Summer
REW-FFWD
Acadia Acadia?!?
Orange
Lumsden
CMYK
In a Box
The Railrodder
Mamori
Beluga Days
Not Pretty, Really
The Cruise
Emergency Ward
Narcissus
Champlain
Neighbours
The Quiet Racket
National Film Board of Canada
Established in 1939, the National Film Board of Canada (or NFB) is mandated to "produce and distribute audio-visual works which provoke discussion and debate on subjects of interest to Canadian audiences and foreign markets." Producing over 13,000 works to date, the NFB is a massively successful agency supporting creativity among artists, animators, and filmmakers. Continuing to innovate, the NFB's scope today includes digital documentaries, apps, and interactive presentations.
Selected Films
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The Railrodder
In one of the last films of the comedian's long career, Buster Keaton stars as a "railrodder" crossing Canada from east to west on a railway track speeder. As might be expected, the film is full of sight gags as Keaton putt-putts his way to British Columbia. Not a word is spoken throughout and...Watch Movie
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The Quiet Racket
This short film tells the amusing tale of a man who feels the common urge to escape the city's noise for the weekend. Made without words, but with a wide range of other sounds, this film tracks our hero to a perfect haven of pandemonium. The countryside, it turns out, is not...Watch Movie
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Narcissus
In this short film by Norman McLaren, dancers enact the Greek tragedy of "Narcissus", the beautiful youth whose excessive self-love condemned him to a trapped existence. Skillfully merging film, dance and music, the film is a compendium of the techniques McLaren acquired over a lifetime of...Watch Movie
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The End of Summer
Filmed at a summer cottage in the Laurentians north of Montreal, this film briefly permeates the charmed world of the adolescent. Watching and listening, you sense the bittersweet mood of childhood's end and the poignant awareness that nothing will ever be the same after this...Watch Movie
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Acadia Acadia?!?
This feature-length documentary is an on-the-spot record of the student protests that shook the Université de Moncton in 1968-69. Led by students desiring greater recognition of the French faction in New Brunswick, the protests spawned street marches, petitions and a sit-in,...Watch Movie
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Champlain
Explorer, colonizer, founder of Québec, discoverer of Lake Champlain, governor of New France, cartographer and writer, few men in Canadian history had a more adventurous and varied career than Samuel de Champlain. This film presents an exciting picture-study of the man and his time.Watch Movie
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Beluga Days
From the lower St. Lawrence, a picture of whale hunting that looks more like a round-up, with a corral, whale-boys and all. In 1534, when he stopped at the island he named L'Isle-aux-Coudres, Jacques Cartier saw how the Indians captured the little white beluga whales by setting a fence of...Watch Movie
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Lumsden
Lumsden, Saskatchewan is a town of 850 citizens on a river called the Qu'Appelle. In the spring of 1974, the river doubled its volume and threatened to flood the town. The townspeople organized themselves and the whole province stood behind them. LUMSDEN is the story of an incredible battle...Watch Movie
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CMYK
This short animation is a dizzying celebration of sound, colour and movement. Here, multitudes of CMYK symbols, pulled off flaps of cereal boxes and other common printed materials, have been isolated and assembled. Freed from their workaday origins, these objects become moving artwork. Colored...Watch Movie
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Hot Stuff
This tongue-in-cheek animated short serves as a cautionary tale against the hazards of fire. Early humans were given the gift of fire, but warned against the dangers, warnings that eventually fell by the wayside. In modern society, overloaded electrical sockets, smouldering cigarettes and other...Watch Movie
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The Cruise
An animated film by John and Faith Hubley in which everything moves to music and where a juke box is the center of everything. THE CRUISE is a fable of our times, about people and numbers and chance, set on a cruise ship where everything is most correct until a maverick passenger decides to flout...Watch Movie
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In a Box
A short animated film of line drawings suggesting the predicament of people who are "boxed in" by life. It takes only a few deft strokes of the animator's pen to show how people's lives are limited by their view of things. The box they are in may be uncomfortable in many ways, but they rush back...Watch Movie
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Mamori
MAMORI transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon...Watch Movie
