Blitzkrieg
1962 · 27m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
German forces overrun western Europe in 1940, Britain endures air attack, and Canadians debate conscription.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1962 NFB doc about conscription debate during the Blitz feels like the *last* place you'd find anything subversive, but there's something quietly radical about a wartime film that refuses triumphalism and instead sits with ambivalence—though it doesn't go nearly far enough to really interrogate the machinery.
This is exactly the kind of rigorous archival essay that defines the NFB's documentary tradition: measured pacing, layered historical argument, and the craft to let competing viewpoints breathe without false resolution—a film that knows its place in the lineage of Canadian public cinema and honors it.
The decision to let the conscription debate *itself* become the dramatic through-line rather than subordinating it to battle footage shows real editorial discipline; it's a small formal choice that transforms what could've been newsreel into something genuinely interrogative.