A Report on Redevelopment: New Course for Halifax
1961 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Jean Roy
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Clearing ten blocks of central Halifax slum housing makes way for Mulgrave Park homes and commercial space. Redevelopment reshapes the downtown core.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1961 NFB doc about urban renewal sounds like the most earnest, consensus-friendly thing imaginable — which is exactly why I'm suspicious it's doing something weirder with the form than the title lets on; if it's playing it straight, it's boring, but if it's got irony baked into that earnestness, that's worth the look.
This sits perfectly in the lineage of Canadian social documentary — the NFB's own pedagogical tradition — and a 12-minute urban renewal report from 1961 is formally curious precisely because it asks what a government film owes to transparency versus narrative shape, a question that still matters in how we talk about infrastructure and displacement.
The unusual element here is likely in how Roy handles the absence — what do you show when documenting erasure, and does the contemplative tone come from a specific editing rhythm or sound design choice that reframes 'progress' as something more ambiguous than the premise suggests?