1. Prayer for a Lost Mitten (Prière pour une mitaine perdue)
The night is falling and Montreal is under the snow. People line up at the lost and found office of the city’s transit company. They all have lost something, which, upon reflection, becomes the symbol of a deeper loss. Prayer for a Lost Mitten is a creative documentary by turns melancholic and festive, yet ever compassionate. A film that helps us get through the winter.
2. Let's Go Get Small
The Canadian Coast Range is a humbling place. The range dwarfs both exceptionally large human beings and egos with its foreboding size. Norseman Productions follows Dave Treadway and Henrik Windstedt as they push into the range on snowmobiles in pursuit of big lines the Coast Range is never short of.
3. The Dionne Quintuplets
In 1934, Elzire Dionne delivered five identical girls. The Dionne Quintuplets follows Cecile, Emilie, Marie, Yvonne and Annette through twenty-one years of strange upbringing. When the girls were just infants, the premier of Ontario issued a court order removing them from parental care. Cut off from the world and their family, over-publicized, viewed twice daily in a special viewing compound, they grew up as prize exhibits. Director Donald Brittain uses old newsreel footage, home-movie sequences and interviews to depict a historic event that became a tragic exploitation of a family.
4. Quebec in Summertime
This Traveltalk series short takes the viewer to Quebec, the city that was called the "New France".
5. Continental Divide
Filmed in 1987, this documentary chronicles the journey of Via Rail's The Canadian as it makes its way across Canada.
It has an average vote of 8 on TMDB.
6. Šmejdi (Šmejdi)
(Šmejdi)
It has an average vote of 5.3 on TMDB.
7. Jasper National Park
This travelogue of Canada's Jasper National Park starts with a visit to the totem pole in the town, then to Lac Beauvert and the park's lodge and bungalows, where more than 600 guests enjoy golf, swimming and scenery. Within the park are the Canadian Rockies' highest summit, largest glaciers, greatest ice fields, and deepest canyons. After a lesson about feeding bears, we tour the vast park: Pyramid Lake and Pyramid Mountain, Mount Edith Cavell and Angel Glacier, a horse trail overlooking the Athabasca River, Athabasca Falls, the Great Colombia Ice Field, Athabasca Glacier and the special cars that bring tourists, and finally Maligne Lake, a fisherman's paradise.
8. Cape Breton Island
This Traveltalk series entry visits the easternmost area of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. We learn that although the island was originally settled by the French, most of the island's inhabitants are of Scottish descent. We are also told that the main industries of the island are agriculture, fishing, and mining. After a look at Bras d'Or Lake, we visit the village of Baddeck. Near there is the grave of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. The last stop is the industrial city of Sydney, home of steel plants, foundries, and coal mines.
9. Glacier Park and Waterton Lakes
We begin at the train station near Montana's Glacier National Park, where Blackfeet Indians meet the arriving tourists. Glacier Park, an off-screen narrator tells us, has the remnants of 60 glaciers, from three ice ages. We visit the lodge, built in Swiss style, where college students dressed in Swiss garb do the serving at the restaurant. We watch Indian dancing and a ceremony. After views of lakes, mountains, and trails in the park, it's north to Canada's Waterton Lakes, a vacation spot for Canadian and U.S. families.
10. The Stone Speakers
In present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, economically depressed towns turn themselves into tourist destinations in order to survive—deliberately forming their own cultural narratives. Centering on four different locations, The Stone Speakers interrogates a nation’s contradictory memories. Made with subtlety and tactful distance, director Igor Drljaca’s film reveals the traumatic consequences of being a country that is stuck in a postwar identity crisis.
It has an average vote of 5.5 on TMDB.
11. Polar Life
Polar Life’s novelty was its theatre, with the audience seated on a central rotating turntable in the middle of eleven fixed screens. Viewers have described the intricate juxtaposition of screen images and narration and the complex relationship created between moving spectators and multiple screens. Documentation images and scripts of the bilingual narration by Lise Payette and Patrick Watson show elaborate temporal and spatial representations of the Arctic and Antarctic regions: the Inuit in daily activities in the Canadian North; other northern peoples of Alaska, Lapland, and Siberia; and settlers from the South, scientists, explorers, and other inhabitants of the landscape, including reindeer, bears, and birds. Archival film footage of early northern explorers, combined with newly shot documentary footage, was edited across the various screens to create spatial relationships that are sometimes coherent, sometimes fragmented.
12. Bowling for Columbine
This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi. From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston, from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist's Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old. Bowling for Columbine is a journey through the US, through our past, hoping to discover why our pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.
It has an average vote of 7.532 on TMDB.
13. Phototaxis
“Phototaxis” draws parallels between Mothman, a prophetic and demonized creature in West Virginia lore, and Narcotics Anonymous, the main treatment program in West Virginia’s addiction epidemic.
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
14. Seven for Jack
In 1894 career criminal Jack Black came to Victoria BC looking for a burglary spree. This film recounts the episode with scenes from present-day Victoria and narration from Black's own recollection.
15. Origins of consciousness
Experimental meditation on land, complexity and evolution, consciousness, interconnection, and artificial intelligence. Shot in the Okanagan and West Kootenays of British Columbia, Canada. Original music by Jack Brintnell.
16. The Corporation
Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.
It has an average vote of 7.7 on TMDB.
17. The Right to Live in Peace (El derecho de vivir en paz)
A moving portrait of Chilean singer-songwriter and political activist Victor Jara that chronicles the life of the talented artist who was imprisoned, tortured and machine-gunned by the country's dictatorship.
It has an average vote of 6.2 on TMDB.
18. Nightmare in Canada: Canadian Horror on Film
Nightmare in Canada is a television documentary that delves into the history of Canada's horror film industry. Not only do Canadian horror films have a distinct look and style, they also explore fear and dread in a truly "tundra terror" way through themes such as "man against nature" and "fighting the evil that comes from within." Nightmare in Canada uncovers gems from Canada's film history that combat the stereotype that Canadian cinema is bland or aloof.
It has an average vote of 5.7 on TMDB.
19. Our American Family
Addiction is an all-encompassing force, in not only the lives of the afflicted, but also those around them. Our American Family provides an honest, unfiltered look at a close-knit Philadelphia family dealing with generational substance abuse.
It has an average vote of 5 on TMDB.
20. A Greater Chance
Upon learning of his father's terminal illness diagnosis, a young, autistic, hearing-impaired music composer and sketch artist travels back to his home to be with him and his mother.
