Each Day That Comes
1966 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Graham Parker
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Dress-shop owner Frances Hyland is respected in her small town yet wonders whether marriage would have been the better path. She decides to meet each day on its own terms rather than dwell on what might have been.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A dress-shop owner wrestling with roads not taken is basically Hallmark Channel DNA, except Parker refuses to resolve it with either a romance or a moral—just Frances, 27 minutes, and the radical boredom of acceptance. Genuinely weird for 1966.
Parker's restraint here is almost liturgical: a character study that inherits from the European art cinema tradition yet stays rooted in small-town Canadian specificity, the kind of formally considered character portrait that defines the NFB's curatorial legacy.
The genius move is letting Hyland's face do the philosophical work—no voiceover, no explanatory scenes, just her presence registering the weight of accommodation, and somehow that single decision transforms a potentially thin premise into something that breathes.