A Day in the Night of Jonathan Mole
1959 · 33m · Canada
Directed by Donald Brittain
Genres: comedy, fantasy, satire
Tones: darkly comic, theatrical, whimsical
In the mythical country of Adanac, arch-bigot Jonathan Mole and other caricatures expose racial prejudice in employment through witty fantasy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1959 NFB satire about bigotry wrapped in whimsy and caricature sounds like the kind of well-meaning liberal sermon everyone applauds—but Brittain's actually sly enough to know that fantasy-land moralizing is its own absurdity, which almost saves it from itself.
Brittain's deployment of theatrical caricature and the invented geography of Adanac situates this firmly in the Canadian documentary-fantasia tradition; the formal wit of using satire as a vehicle for social critique shows the careful architecture of a filmmaker thinking through his medium.
The decision to filter social commentary through outright fantasy and grotesque character design rather than direct testimony is what gives this its strange power—it's a technical choice about *distance* that makes the prejudice both more absurd and more cutting than a straight polemic could manage.