The Heavenly Bodies

A series of very brief clips celebrates the 50th anniversary of the National Film Board of Canada.

In a lonely setting, a teenage girl dreams. She is bored, manifests childish rebellions: her nascent personality rears up and asserts itself. "Be our star," suggests a director of women's pages. What will this flight to the world of work bring to Solange?

In this period thriller set near the turn of the century, Jan Thoreau is a Canadian trapper who lives with his wife Marie in a small community in the wilderness not far from Hudson Bay. Blake is a disturbed drifter who has murdered a man and has found a way to frame Jan for his crime. Jan is out tending to his traps when an Indian friend with psychic talents tells him Marie is in grave danger. Jan hurries back, but he has no idea just how serious matters are until he arrives home -- Jan is wanted by the law for a crime he didn't commit, while Blake is hiding out in his home, and has taken Marie hostage.

This short, silent film captures a Sunday afternoon at a community skating rink. Iconic Quebec director Gilles Carle has the camera follow toddlers learning to skate, young girls flashing their skates and boys decked out in the colours of their favourite hockey teams. A picture perfect moment on a bright winter's day.

This documentary explores the economic, sociological, and cultural aspects of food systems and consumption in a major city, focusing on the disconnect between food production and consumption.

This short documentary shows Canada's top swimmers in training for the 1964 Olympic Games. Under the critical eye of coach Ed Healy, they practice long hours in the gym and in the pool to build strength and stamina.

This quirky little short by Gilles Carle was filmed on the pierced rock that stands near Quebec’s Gaspé peninsula. It is perhaps the most photographed natural phenomenon on Canada’s East Coast. Shot in the 1960s, the film has a very psychedelic feel to it, with animation, special effects, and a trio of women to guide us through.

The lives of the average Quebecois Plouffe family during the final years of the depression and through World War II.

A worker, called in a hurry to remove the snow in the city street, try to buy his remaining gifts in the tumult of Christmas eve without quitting his work.

In this French–Canadian oddity of music and drama, an actress in a traveling musical revue is involved with the show's director until she meets and falls for an aging ecological activist. He too is drawn to her, and together they try to stop a factory from being built over an old-growth forest.

A young woman, living with her parents and siblings on a remote farm in harsh, picturesque northern Québec, has three suitors: a steady and unimaginative farmer, Eutrope, the Americanized and wealthy Lorenzo, who has sought his fortune in Boston, and François Paradis, a rough and virile logger who captures her heart despite the warnings of her parents and the village priest. For a year, marked by seasonal change in an atmosphere charged with the strangeness of Indians and the demons of the woods, we see Maria at work and prayer, struggling with decisions, choosing to stay in Canada, in love with François, seeking to change his rough behaviors, and dealing with extraordinary loss.

Bernadette has a yen to chuck it all and go back to nature, in this French-language Canadian film. That's just what she does after carefully leaving her wedding ring where her affluent husband, a lawyer, can see it. She has bought a farm, complete with a run-down farmhouse and a live-in cranky old man. Soon, because of the wonderful effects that her sympathy and her outsider's perspective have, her neighbors perceive great improvements in their lives. They attribute these changes to something miraculous (perhaps taking a cue from her name), and hordes of needy people descend on her farm.

Working as a pharmacy clerk while dreaming of escape through dance, Normande St-Onge supports a household of dependent and unstable relatives. As her efforts to protect and hold together her improvised family intensify, the pressures of exploitation, eviction, and emotional isolation push her toward psychological collapse. Directed by Gilles Carle, the film blurs the boundary between fantasy and breakdown.

When a sexually promiscuous young woman finds herself pregnant and unmarried her three brothers vow to find the man responsible and punish him for what they consider the rape of their sister.