
01 Jan 1987

Secrets of the Unknown: Tornadoes
Tornadoes explores nature's deadly spirals. Highlights include actual footage of the violent force and the mass destruction that tornadoes create.
In Thorold, Ontario in the summer of 1996, a movie legend was made when a real-life tornado hit a drive-in theatre during a screening of Twister. But how much truth really lies inside this tale of life (or weather) imitating art?
01 Jan 1987
Tornadoes explores nature's deadly spirals. Highlights include actual footage of the violent force and the mass destruction that tornadoes create.
01 Jan 1940
This short documentary is part of the Canada Carries On series of morale-boosting wartime propaganda films. In Home Front, the various WWII-era social contributions of women are highlighted. From medicine to industrial labour to hospitality, education and domesticity, the service these women provided to their country is lauded.
09 Oct 2002
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.
08 Mar 1987
Gil Cardinal searches for his natural family and an understanding of the circumstances that led to his becoming a foster child. An important figure in the history of Canadian Indigenous filmmaking, Gil Cardinal was born to a Métis mother but raised by a non-Indigenous foster family, and with this auto-biographical documentary he charts his efforts to find his biological mother and to understand why he was removed from her. Considered a milestone in documentary cinema, it addressed the country’s internal colonialism in a profoundly personal manner, winning a Special Jury Prize at Banff and multiple international awards.
31 Dec 2007
In this short documentary, a Musqueam elder rediscovers his Native language and traditions in the city of Vancouver, in the vicinity of which the Musqueam people have lived for thousands of years. Writing the Land captures the ever-changing nature of a modern city - the glass and steel towers cut against the sky, grass, trees and a sudden flash of birds in flight and the enduring power of language to shape perception and create memory.
27 Oct 2024
In 1968, Billy and Antoinette Edwards participated in a landmark documentary that would intimately observe their turbulent relationship. Over 50 years later, their son Bogart sat down to view and discuss the resulting film, A Married Couple.
05 Sep 2019
Director Mirjam Leuze’s The Whale and The Raven illuminates the many issues that have drawn whale researchers, the Gitga’at First Nation, and the Government of British Columbia into a complex conflict. As the people in the Great Bear Rainforest struggle to protect their territory against the pressure and promise of the gas industry, caught in between are the countless beings that call this place home.
18 Aug 2022
Documentary on career criminal Jack Black during an episode of burglary in Victoria BC. Locations around Victoria and Vancouver are explored in present day, with narration from Black's autobiography.
02 Jun 2023
Experimental meditation on land, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Shot in the Okanagan and West Kootenays. Original music by Jack Brintnell.
17 Oct 2024
When Canada entered World War II, the National Film Board suddenly had an urgent new mission—and hundreds of women stepped forward, helping to create Canadian cinema as we now know it.
23 Feb 2017
The director goes back to her roots in Pangnirtung, amongst her family and community. It leads her to another journey: to Qipisa, the outpost camp from where they were uprooted.
19 Sep 2003
The filmed account of a large Canadian rock festival train tour boasting major acts. In the summer of 1970, a chartered train crossed Canada carrying some of the world's greatest rock bands. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy, and others lived (and partied) together for five days, stopping in major cities along the way to play live concerts. Their journey was filmed.
25 Oct 2019
A young and ambitious team of chefs face the life-changing challenges of competing in the world's most prestigious culinary competition.
09 Nov 1984
Women have always sought ways to terminate unwanted pregnancies, despite powerful patriarchal structures and systems working against them. This film provides a historical overview of how church, state and the medical establishment have determined policies concerning abortion. From this cross-cultural survey--filmed in Ireland, Japan, Thailand, Peru, Colombia, and Canada--emerges one reality: only a small percentage of the world's women has access to safe, legal operations.
10 Dec 2022
Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the west coast of Canada, is home to Skil Jaadee and her family. They live in harmony with nature and have made it their mission to save their language and preserve their history.
02 Oct 1995
Track monsoons, hurricanes, blizzards, and tornadoes. Take a journey around the planet to experience our most extreme storms and to witness the dramatic--and often perilous--efforts of scientists in the pursuit of understanding weather.Join meteorologists in the cockpit of a P-3 weather plane as they penetrate the eye of a hurricane; and in the tense, decisive moments on the road as they focus their radar on an approaching tornado, traveling to the heart of severe storms to learn what makes weather systems tick. Experience the bumpy ride into the sudden and spectacular calm of a hurricane’s eye, or the commando-like raid to the very brink of a killer tornado, and experience one of the elemental joys of doing science: that of confronting nature head-on to divine its awesome secrets.
01 Aug 1975
A promotional video produced by the Alberta government in 1975, "The time of the tar sands", featuring Gordon Pinsent. credit: Archives of Alberta.
20 Sep 1999
Canadian director Catherine Annau's debut work is a documentary about the legacy of Pierre Trudeau, the long-running Prime Minister of Canada, who governed during the 1970s. The film focuses particularly on Trudeau's goal of creating a thoroughly bilingual nation. Annau interviews eight people in their mid-30s on both sides of the linguistic divide. One tells of her life growing up in a community of hard-core Quebec separatists, while another, a yuppie from Toronto, recalls believing as a child that people in Montreal got drunk and had sex all day long. Annau has all of the interviewees discuss how Trudeau's policies affected their lives and their perceptions of the other side, in this issue that strikes to the heart of Canada's national identity.
21 Feb 2017
Every winter for decades, the Northwest Territories, in the Canadian Far North, changes its face. While the landscape is covered with snow and lakes of a thick layer of ice, blocking land transport, ice roads are converted to frozen expanses as far as the eye can see.
21 Sep 2022
In this searing documentary, Indigenous people share heartbreaking stories that reveal the injustices inflicted by the Canadian child welfare system.