Canada in film on the web
I’ve been surfing the new web site of Canada’s National Film Board, a gateway to a collection of some 700 of the thousands of films that the agency has made about Canada and the world since 1939. It’s at www.nfb.ca.
NFB
My attention was immediately grabbed by two marvelous films. One, The Enemy Within, is a touching documentary by the daughter of a German prisoner of war who spent three and a half years in a POW camp in Lethbridge, Alberta. Eva Colmers has drawn on her father’s letters and her experiences as a Canadian filmmaker to describe how the humane treatment her father and 25,000 other German prisoners received in Canada changed their lives forever.
The second film I watched also was about imprisonment during World War II, but it told quite a different story. Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941, is part of the Valour and Horror series by Brian McKenna which has attracted much controversy.
The survivors among the 2,000 ill-prepared Canadian soldiers who were sent to help defend Hong Kong spent the war years in Japanese prisoner of war camps. As the film’s promotional blurb puts it, “many of them would come to envy the dead.”
The National Film Board is one of those unique Canadian institutions supported by public funding which has given Canadian creators an outlet when the private sector was not sufficiently developed to provide an opportunity for artists to film, write, paint and otherwise depict the Canadian story.
Today, with multiple production companies supported by such agencies as Telefilm Canada and the Canadian TV Fund, the NFB no longer plays a dominant role in capturing Canadian filmmaking. But it still produces much entertaining and worthwhile material.
The decision to put these films on what the NFB calls its Online Screening Room should stimulate and deepen interest in our collective past.
The NFB’s first commissioner, the great John Grierson, established standards for documentary films that have since been emulated throughout the world. He was followed by Ross McLean, who ran afoul of the witch-hunting attitude of the1950s, and then by Arthur Irwin , the Canadian diplomat who “calmed the storm” and put the agency on a solid basis.
As of 2007, the NFB had garnered 70 Academy Award nominations, winning 12 Oscars.
Spend some time on this site!
