In Praise of the NFB

I in my post about streaming services yesterday, I mentioned some free video streaming services. But I missed one – Canada's National Film Board. There you'll find thousands of short films, documentaries, and feature films produced by Canadian film makers going back more than half a century.

Chris Morgan of The Outline likes it too.

The experience of binging the NFB can be vertiginous. One film will leapfrog me to another, often within my interest of Canadian social and political history, of which the NFB has plenty to offer. Indeed, it is filled with documentaries that have matched and even surpassed the fly-on-the-wall style of Primary and The War Room. Flora: Scenes from a Leadership Convention (1977) follows Canada’s first female foreign minister Flora MacDonald as she and her staff try (and fail) to make her the first female Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and therefore the opposition. Sophie Wollock’s Newspaper (1979) is a short history of The Suburban, a sort of Breitbart for anglophone Quebec. Acadia Acadia?!? (1971) depicts student radicals of New Brunswick’s francophone minority as they demonstrate for language recognition. My personal favorite is Donald Brittain’s The Champions, a three-part saga released between 1978 and 1986 covering the rise and rivalry of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Quebec Premier and separatist icon René Lévesque. It combines talking heads, archival footage, droll narration, and a clear arc from brilliant promise to disappointment and corruption.