National Film Board 1939-2009
For 70 years, the National Film Board of Canada has been breaking ground in socially-engaged documentary, auteur animation, alternative drama and more! This is how the NFB/ONF (Office National du Film du Canada) modestly, in small letters, celebrates itself on its site, see address below. Luckily, the upcoming Hotdocs festival rightfully raises the voice and celebrates the unique importance of NFB for the world history of the documentary film. At the festival that takes place in Toronto April 30-May 10 2009, this is done through a “special program that will bring together some special guest programmers – filmmakers, film professionals and other public figures – to select their favourite NFB documentaries of the past 70 years.”
As a true NFB fan I visited the Montréal studios in 1979 and 1989 to celebrate, and to get inspiration for new distribution and production policies. But also to watch films that would fit in our Danish non-commercial distribution. We had dozens of NFB animation films (Norman McLaren, Caroline Leaf) in the catalogue as well as wonderful important documentaries by Colin Low, Kroitor/Koenig and Michel Brault. When I was asked to pick my favourite for the Hotdocs programme, I started humming “put your hand on my shoulder”, remembering one of the many beautiful scenes from the 1962 Kroitor/Koenig cinema vérité classic with and about Paul Anka, “Lonely Boy”. There are many other “auteurs” to highlight when talking about NFB, and they are not appreciated enough in the “official” documentary history literature, that always goes American and British. One name stands out, Pierre Perrault, the film poet from Quebec.
You can buy dvd’s of NFB films, you can watch some online, it is simply a good old centralised and efficient distribution mechanism, that works.
http://www.hotdocs.ca/
http://www3.nfb.ca/index.php
