Circle of the Sun

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 adventure film features Scott McVay, an authority on whales, and filmmaker Bill Mason. The objective was to film the bowhead, a magnificent inhabitant of the cold Arctic seas brought to the edge of extinction by overfishing. With helicopter and Inuit guide, aqualungs and underwater cameras, the expedition searches out and meets the bowhead and beluga.

A look at the Hutterites, an Anabaptist religious community similar to the Amish or the Mennonites in rural Alberta. The followers of religious leader Jacob Hutter live in farm communities, devoutly holding to the rules their founder laid down four centuries ago. Through the kindness of a Hutterite colony in Alberta, this film, in black and white, was made inside the community and shows all aspects of the Hutterites' daily life.

"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 tense, tight close-up of stunt man Ken Carter's role on the stock-car racing track. Risking life and limb to rocket a car from a ramp over a parked line of cars takes more than the will to make a living. What else is involved is shown by the film as the camera looks and listens while the stunt man readies for his act and then makes his wild ride.

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

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.

This short puppet animation from the fifties tells the story of Magic Bow, a First Nations boy endowed with magic gifts. Magic Bow is in the big city for the first time, thrilling audiences with his tricks at the Wild West Rodeo. Outside the arena, cars, trucks and buses zip by at dizzying speeds. With the help of some savvy city dwellers, Magic Bow learns a few important traffic rules to help him navigate the streets safely.

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 short film from Arthur Lipsett is an abstract collage of snippets from discarded footage found by Lipsett in the editing room of the National Film Board (where he worked as an animator), combined with his own black and white 16mm footage shot on the streets of Montreal and New York City, among other locations. A commentary on a machine-dominated society, it is often cited as an influence on George Lucas's Star Wars and his conceptualization of "The Force."

"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.