Donald Brittain Movies

Features clips from 21 documentary and animation film classics, interviews with NFB filmmakers past and present, and incisive commentary from film...

In this experimental collage film, Arthur Lipsett reworks over fifty years of newsreel footage into a surreal audiovisual montage of...

Through rare film footage and interviews with some of the pioneers who made film history, this documentary traces the history of filmmaking in Canada...

Everything seems normal at a hockey arena until the roof, straining under the weight of the ice and snow that has built up, finally gives way,...

A 1964 documentary portrait of Cohen in his pre-musician days as a poet and stand-up comedian.

A retrospective of documentary films by Donald Brittain offering a glimpse of the man and the restless energy that informed his work. Dedicated and...

A film biography of Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who served with the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and with the North Chinese...

This film is a revealing portrait of a tough cop with a big heart. Sergeant Bernie "Whistling" Smith walks the beat on Vancouver's Eastside, the...

A biography of Enrico Fermi, the scientist who discovered the chain reaction in nuclear physics. Follows his career in Italy and later in America,...

In 1934, Elzire Dionne delivered five identical girls. The Dionne Quintuplets follows Cecile, Emilie, Marie, Yvonne and Annette through twenty-one...

Family offers a candid look at CBC Radio in action and the unique cast of characters who make up Canada's coast-to-coast radio family. The film...

In this Academy Award–nominated animated satire, Martian observers analyze life on Earth and reach a startling conclusion: automobiles appear...

This short documentary profiles 27-year-old Scoggie Watson, a Cape Breton stalwart who clings to the things he cherishes most: the waters of Lake...

This film shows the scientific study of fires set to buildings in Aultsville, Ontario, a town evacuated for flooding by the St. Lawrence Seaway....

This short animated film is about Wop May, one of Canada's leading bush pilots in the 1920s.

It was the time when fire got stolen by tigers so uncle tiger gets his sisters son to get back the fire but when he gets to the village he forgets...

This film is a short documentary portrait of economist, technologist and lecturer Fritz Schumacher. Up to age 45, Schumacher was dedicated to...

The early history of Canadian film making before the establishment of the National Film Board of Canada.

This 1964 documentary returns to the battlefields where over 100,000 Canadian soldiers lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars. The film...

At twenty-six, Noel Starblanket was one of the youngest Indigenous chiefs in North America--twice elected chief of the Starblanket Reserve, and also...