A Question of Identity: War of 1812
1966 · 27m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
In pioneer settlements along the Upper St. Lawrence and Niagara, farmers who once cleared land together must choose loyalties when the War of 1812 spills into Canada, sparking an emerging sense of Canadian identity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1966 NFB doc about the War of 1812 sounds like the most consensus-approved historical trudge imaginable—but if this is the vault-find that made you flag it, I'm betting there's something deliberately unsettling about how it frames 'Canadian identity' that most people miss on first watch.
This is quintessential early-60s NFB—a film that understands identity formation as a documentary problem, not just a narrative one, situated squarely in the tradition of Grierson's social-purpose cinema translated through a distinctly Canadian lens of measured contemplation and formal restraint.
The real move here is probably in how the filmmakers hold on the faces of these settlers during the actual moment of choice—not the choice itself, but the hesitation before it, which is where the entire emerging nation somehow lives in 27 minutes.