Donald Brittain Movies

A portrait of John Grierson, the first Canadian Government Film Commissioner and founder of the National Film Board in 1939. Interweaving archival...

In this hybrid of animation and live-action, a counterculture monkey blows the studio's budget directing a bizarre fantasy film, which is actually an...

In Montréal, Jean-Pierre is fired on the set of a TV commercial where he's an apprentice technician. He's penniless, behind on his rent, with...

April - November 1940. With devastating speed Germany takes Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Italy declares war.

A Jewish Holocaust survivor travels through Germany recalling scenes from his memory. This documentary follows a Holocaust survivor in 1965 on an...

This feature-length Oscar®-nominated documentary focuses on Malcolm Lowry, author of one of the major novels of the 20th century, Under the...

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

Part documentary/part dramatization, this film details several of the highest-profile unsolved cases of disappearances, mysterious changes in...

A middle-aged family man and high school teacher struggles in silence as he accepts the fact that he is gay.

A biographical drama that profiles the life of Hal C. Banks, a controversial American labour union leader, who came to Canada in 1949 to lead a...

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

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

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,...

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

The final instalment of this 3-part documentary series about Pierre Elliott Trudeau and René Lévesque spans the decade between 1976 and...

This feature documentary traces the political career of T.C. (Tommy) Douglas, former premier of Saskatchewan and leader of the New Democratic Party,...

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

A view from a helicopter of the ten Canadian provinces in 1966. The result is a big, beautiful and engrossing bird's-eye portrait of the country....

In the fall of 1964, just over a year before his death, Buster Keaton traveled to Canada to make The Railrodder, a short subject that now enjoys a...