Cinderella on the Left
1962 · 27m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
Canadian troops battle through the Scheldt and face rocket attacks as the Second World War nears its final winter.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1962 NFB doc about Canadian troops in the Scheldt—exactly the kind of institutional war footage everyone assumes they've already seen, which is precisely why it's invisible; if there's something genuinely weird lurking in the formal choices here, it's buried under decades of archival dust.
The Scheldt campaign sits at a crucial inflection point in both cinema and history—this 27-minute essay occupies that rare space where documentary form can interrogate the mythology of a nation's own war, and the NFB's editorial restraint in 1962 speaks volumes about how Canada chose to remember itself.
What matters here isn't the archival footage itself but how the filmmakers have woven contemplation into a combat narrative—there's a specific editorial rhythm that lets rocket attacks breathe as moral weight rather than spectacle, and that decision transforms what could've been pure newsreel into something that actually asks you to *feel* the winter closing in.