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From the flat roof of his old house, a young Nova Scotian turns and takes a 360o look at life in Sambro, Nova Scotia, the small coastal village where he now lives.

This short, bleak French-language drama is the first film by Canadian director Andre Theberge. The story concerns a young woman saddled with too many concerns and not enough means. She has been ill and has been given the job of sewing shirts as a means of recovery as well as a livelihood. Abandoned by her husband, she has three very young children to raise, and the combination of fatigue, worry, and just plain despair slowly send her over the brink.

Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.

Obomsawin narrates as children learn of the traditions and life of Gabriel, a Cree boy from Fort George, James Bay. The Northern Cree "Walking Out Ceremony" is one such tradition. This is followed by scenes of Gabriel touring Old Montreal.

A 1973 recording of Glenn Lewis' multi-media synchronized swimming performance.

This film illustrates the theory that a sudden change in climate caused by a stellar explosion resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

"Here is the quintessential Hancox 'personal documentary,' a film in which both the production and role of traditional documentary and autobiographical filmmaking are thrown into question. Using his camera to record a visit out east by train to spend Christmas with the family, Hancox .... used his familiarization with the annual ritual as a form of a script... Although we see the journey through the subjective judgment of Hancox’s eyes, it is his intent to transfer the material from original event to camera, to editing, and finally to the audience, so that the personal content of the film... becomes universal.” Michael Wade, Ontario Film Studies, Cinema Parallel “It is the honesty of portrayal which is staggering, for instead of an idyllic image which many filmmakers present of themselves, Hancox presents (and thus, sees) himself without cinematic make-up... with ‘wild sync’ sound (reminiscent of an early film), and with the use of only available natural light.” Richard Stanford

About a strike in which women are involved, but told in a very different way.

Part 1 of the Corporation documentary film series depicting the inner workings of the Steinberg supermarket chain. Through the eyes of President Sam Steinberg, the film depicts the company’s growth from a hand-cart and bicycle, then a horse-drawn delivery wagon, to an international, diversified corporation. “A company can't stand still," he says. “It must grow”.

This film was directly produced on a diverted computer without the involvement of any film equipment. Originally, this film was not in black and white, but in absolute black and full light. Indeed, initially, the screenings were only made with originals in which absolute black was achieved through the use of a totally opaque tape, while absolute white was generated by computer perforation (thus allowing all the light to pass through without the slightest opacity of film material). This film is not the transcription of a movement, but a succession of constructed composite facts which the projection device translates for the eye into impression of movements. It does not refer to any external reality, but is meant to be its own reality.

Nuclear power plants are not exactly sold on the same scale as wheat, but that they can be manufactured as an exportable commodity is well illustrated in this film. For those familiar with nuclear power generation, and even for the lay audience, this is a lucid exposition of how a nuclear power plant is put together. The film shows the machining and assembly of principal components, and the "on power" operation of the Canadian plant at Pickering, Ontario. Produced by the NFB for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.

The film explores the First Nations perspective on Thomas R. Berger's Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry of the mid-1970s.

The principle of stillness in Sequels in trasfigured times is like a botanical drying procedure for film which conserves a fixed but superb memory of the shapes.

A Canadian prairie farm family has a tough beginning on their new farm.

Night of Samhain is a humorous look at Halloween, the holiday with no redeeming social value. A holiday that values outrageous behaviour. A holiday that has been a thorn in the side of organized religion for centuries and one that many wish would disappear.

An amusing portrait of an Art Star, toughing it out in rural New Brunswick, Canada.

The film is about Moses Coady, who was called many things in his lifetime, but who proved to be the most effective social reformer Canada has known. He went into the villages, organized the people into study groups, helped them set up credit unions and co-operatives, and freed them from the semi-feudal conditions they lived in. Today, people from all over the world come to study his methods at the Coady International Institute in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. (NFB)

"Not enough attention is paid to photogenic objects. A telephone receiver, for instance..." - Louis Delluc.

Animated interpretations of two poems by great Canadian wordsmiths: “Perishing Bird” by D.G. Jones, and “Mon école” by Sylvain Garneau.

Arthur Lipsett’s N-Zone is the longest, loosest and last of the collage films he produced at Canada’s National Film Board (NFB). It marks the end-point of his trajectory from feted young genius to discarded problem child/eccentric within the NFB.

A young designer, Selma Bryant-Fournier, starts her career in a large clothing manufacturing firm in Montreal. She hopes to design clothes for mass production that are beautiful, functional and affordable by everyone.

In the town of Saint-Hyacinthe in Quebec, far from the halls of concert, the men share their lives between their profession of harmonist in the factory of Casavant organs and their participation in the activities of the company local philharmonic.

he claustrophobia of media "reality" - compartmentalized into game shows, movies, news reports, commercials - is presented as continuous interchangeable spectacle. This film looks at the ideology of misrepresentation, the turning of facts into icons, history into myth. It analyzes the media's metalanguage, especially the image of woman as spectacle and commodity; and the psychology and economics of male voyeurism.

The subject of the first essay is cinema itself: an apparatus of representation wherein fact and fiction are recreated. As such, the pro-filmic facts are necessarily drawn from two of cinema's "pioneers": Louis and Auguste Lumière and Abel Gance (La Roue), with additional material provided from a Warner Brothers featurette, Spills for Thrills.

Joy is a research biologist, a consultant to a large company. She is also a widow with two school-age children. In discussing her own dilemmas she speaks for many other women. "The powers that be know that women do work, but they turn a deaf ear." Apart from "discrimination against women," Joy sees the absence of universal day care as a loss for children too.

Tierra y Libertad is the name of a united front of former Mexican peasants gathered on the outskirts of the city of Monterrey, in the industrial north of Mexico, who are occupying urban land and building their own type of society there.

A poetic document depicting psychological, alchemical, and physical aspects of earlier work in visual "transmutation" at the Visual Alchemy Studio, Vancouver 1973. The work depicted in this film includes early holography at this first art-holography studio in Canada and the projection of real and holographic images in space utilizing lasers and optics. The sound track uses text fragments from my work and quotes from Carl Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. (A.R.)

"A disk of wax soaked with lighter fluid is placed on one end of the balanced plywood. I run toward and Jump on the other end, catapulting the wax over my head in hopes of striking a strip of toilet paper, lighting and burning it. (the strips of toilet paper are strung in rows across the parking lot) The performance / film ends when all of the strips have caught fire." - David Askevold

In 'Vortex', the intense subjectivity of techno-psychedelia converges with the technological gamesmanship of the space race. The subject matter, however, is 'space' and extinction.

An incident from the early days of Québec's quiet revolution, tailor-made for the cartoonist. It is the story of a Montréal commuter train, a unilingual ticket collector and a bilingual passenger. The passenger appears on screen himself to describe his bid to have tickets requested in French as well as in English. What ensued, and how even the railway president became involved, is illustrated with wit and humor.

A docudrama depicting the lives of Canadian alcoholics who hang out at a park on the river called "The Willows".

Video art by Ernest Gusella made between 1975 and 1980

This film is an album of Native womanhood, portraying a proud matriarchal society that for centuries has been pressured to adopt different standards and customs. All of the women featured share a belief in the importance of tradition as a source of strength in the face of change.

This documentary by Michael Rubbo (Waiting for Fidel) offers candid glimpses of Indonesia and its people. Filming in and around the capital of Jakarta, the cameras follow where chance leads, capturing the flavour of life in this fertile crescent of tropical islands. Throughout the film, the focus is on a society caught between the past and the conflicting options for the future - to change or not to change from long-established patterns of life to ones more influenced by western technology.

This short documentary highlights one of the biannual dinners at Club Prosper Montagné, a leading international gastronomic society. While elaborate dishes are served with great pomp, we meet Québec’s Chef of the year Marcel Kretz, who is coordinating the feast from the kitchen of Hotel La Sapinière, in the Laurentians.

Joe Fafard is a sculptor living in the small town of Pense in rural Saskatchewan. There isn't much in Pense except for about 300 people and a lot of cows. Joe does small sculptures of the town's human and bovine residents, which have been exhibited and acclaimed in various places around the world.

This film is about the emotions that can lead one to take that jump into space necessary for hang gliding with a Delta Plane.

The film explores how the three British colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island became provinces of Canada and charts the subsequent decline of their economies after Confederation. Photographs, archival drawings, cartoons and interviews with Maritime historians are used to document the case.

This documentary is a portrait of modern-day Pondicherry, an ancient city near the southern tip of India.

Child at play with a rocking horse and other toys

Toni, Randi and Marie is a unique cinéma-vérité trilogy about the everyday lives of the eponymous female impersonator cabaret star, trans hustler, and female sex worker. This honest and intimate film depicts the underbelly of the Expo-Olympics metropolis of Montreal.

"On the occasion of my 27th birthday I decided to do a tape that chronicled my passage through time. I have always been clumsy, tripping, dropping, falling with alarming regularity. This tape accepts the extent of the consequences." L.S.

This feature-length documentary offers a glimpse at the unknown world that lies beneath the Arctic ice. Arctic IV follows Dr. Joseph MacInnis, a specialist in underwater medicine, as he probes and explores the polar depth. Filmed at Resolute Bay, Dr. MacInnis and his team must chip through 2 metres of ice and dive into the frigid, watery depth at the North Pole - all in the name of science.

This animated short tells a humourous Hebrew folk tale about a man's venture to introduce onions to a far away kingdom and a disreputable man's attempt to exploit that.

An elementary school film on multiplication based on the theories of Professor Zoltan Dienes.

Travel as mediated spectacle, a time lapse journey from Vancouver to Reno and Las Vegas Nevada; speed as stasis, abstraction, violence, culminating in a 'televised abduction and police chase at the border' and a 'letter to home'. Within this long, high-speed with time-lapse drive through deserts and neon wastelands of 'Amerika', we can ask: 'Who is the voyeur, who kidnaps who, who is cruising the boulevards, and who is the object of the gaze'?

"Fill is my first video; the monitor becomes a picture-sound box. The screen is filled by laying sheets of aluminum foil on a microphone and wrapped one at a time and then unwrapped. The audio implodes during the wrapping and explodes as the sheets are pulled away from the microphone. Besides the obvious reading of physical filling, the title also refers to filling time or a 'filler' between television shows."- Askevold

Modern Love is the story of Xerox operator, Robin, who falls in love with a sleazy show business type named Lamont Del Monte. Their disastrous love affair is paralleled by a frustrating relationship between Heidi (who only speaks German) and Pierre (who only speaks French).

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