The Romance of Transportation in Canada

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 against impossible odds.

From Gerald Potterton (director of the cult classic Heavy Metal), this short film depicts the daydream of a chauffeur awaiting his employer. On a hot summer day, he begins to imagine that it's winter—the residential street where he's parked transforms into snowy mountains, and a series of comic misadventures begin. As the car is replaced by a toboggan, it carries the tycoon away on a dizzying ride. The chase includes some unforgettable antics in the snow, including a piggyback ride on an incredulous skier.

This short documentary profiles a community engaged in developing sustainable living methods, including food production and small-scale solar and wind technology, on a farm in Massachusetts in the 1970s. Well before sustainability was a mainstream concern, these prescient innovators attempted to create a vision of a greener, kinder world. "Think small," say the New Alchemists. "Look what thinking big has done."

Rousing tales of the North-West Mounted Police are brought to life through photos and artists' sketches. In 1873, the North-West Mounted Police were established to maintain law and order in the North-West Territories. They undertook a trek from Fort Dufferin, south of Winnipeg, to Fort Whoop-up, near present-day Lethbridge, Alberta. The force raised the flag and proclaimed the Queen's Law, ensuring that the Canadian West would not become a lawless, American-style frontier.

"Labyrinth" is a groundbreaking multi-screen 45-minute presentation produced for Chamber III of the Labyrinth at Expo 67 in Montreal, using 35 mm and 70 mm film projected simultaneously on multiple screens. A film without commentary in which multiple images, sometimes complementary, sometimes contrasting, draw the viewer through the different stages of a labyrinth. The tone of the film moves from great joy to wrenching sorrow; from stark simplicity to ceremonial pomp. It is life as it is lived by the people of the world, each one, as the film suggests, in a personal labyrinth. Re-released in 1979 as "In the Labyrinth" by the National Film Board of Canada in a 21-minute single projection format.

This feature documentary profiles the brave Canadians who fought in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. To save Spain's constitutionally elected government from the threat of a fascist dictatorship (which eventually prevailed), over 40,000 volunteers from around the world fought in Spain, and 1200 of those were the Canadians of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. More than half of them never returned. This respectful, emotional and historically rich film is committed to the memory of those who truly believed in the cause of the Spanish Republic.

A look at the various modes of transportation made for the Expo '86 World Fair in Vancouver, Canada.

This feature documentary follows one of the greatest Canadian baseball players of all time, Ferguson Jenkins, through the 1972-1973 season. From the hope and innocence of spring training to the dog days of an August slump, the camera gets up close and personal at the home plate and records the intimate chatter on the mound, in the dugout and in the locker room. It provides a glimpse into the rewards and pressures of sports stardom and the easy camaraderie of the quintessential summer sport.

An NFB crew filmed a group of three families, Cree hunters from Mistassini. Since times predating agriculture, this First Nations people have gone to the bush of the James Bay and Ungava Bay area to hunt. We see the building of the winter camp, the hunting and the rhythms of Cree family life.

Pete Standing Alone is a Blood Indian who, as a young man, was more at home in the White man's culture than his own. Confronted with the realization that his children knew very little about their origins, he became determined to pass down to them the customs and traditions of his ancestors. This film is the powerful biographical study of a 25-year span in Pete's life, from his early days as an oil-rig roughneck, rodeo rider and cowboy, to the present as an Indian concerned with preserving his tribe's spiritual heritage in the face of an energy-oriented industrial age.

This short, impressionistic film takes us to Nigeria, Japan, Mexico and India, where craftsmen work clay to produce ritual vessels and everyday objects.

Corral is a 1954 National Film Board of Canada documentary by Colin Low, partly shot in the Cochrane Ranch in what is now Cochrane, Alberta. In the film, a cowboy rounds up wild horses, lassoing one of the high-spirited animals in the corral, then going on a ride across the Rocky Mountain Foothills of Alberta.

This Colin Low documentary from 1959 depicts Venice in all its splendor. In the tradition of Venetian painter Canaletto, the film captures the great Italian city’s elusive beauty and fabled landscapes, where spired churches and turreted palaces soar into a blue Mediterranean sky. Narration by William Shatner.

"Fogo is a windswept island off the coast of Newfoundland where the inhabitants for generations have lived by, on and from the sea. In this film William Wells, fisherman, and his two sons take a day off from the nets for a journey to the gannet colony on the Funk Islands, fifty miles farther out to sea. There are exceptional close-up views of enormous flocks of seabirds swarming on the cliffs and in the sky."

The Living Stone is a 1958 Canadian short documentary film directed by John Feeney about Inuit art. It shows the inspiration behind Inuit sculpture. The Inuit approach to the work is to release the image the artist sees imprisoned in the rough stone. The film centres on an old legend about the carving of the image of a sea spirit to bring food to a hungry camp. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Arthur Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.