Canada's Capital: Behind the Scenes
1989 · 24m · Canada
Directed by Ian Ferguson
Genres: documentary, family
Young hosts tour Ottawa's hidden corners to show how the capital serves citizens across the country.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A cheerful civics lesson dressed up as whimsy—exactly the kind of earnest institutional content that makes you wonder if NFB contracts come with mandatory earnestness clauses. Pass.
Ferguson taps into a lineage of Canadian public documentaries that use youthful energy and structural clarity to make infrastructure legible; the whimsy here serves formal purpose, and the editing discipline keeps what could be a pamphlet from becoming one.
The decision to use young, personable hosts instead of a narrator's authority flattens what could've been a stiff tour—it's a small choice that transforms the entire register from didactic to genuinely approachable.