Endings and Beginnings
1995 · 49m · Canada
Directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Canadian veterans recall the war's final European battles in 1945 and the challenge of reintegrating afterward.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A respectable oral history, sure, but it's doing exactly what you'd expect a 1995 NFB doc to do—let the vets talk, add some archival dust, call it profound. Where's the formal provocation?
Macartney-Filgate's restraint here is the point: by letting veterans' voices anchor the frame without manipulation, he situates this squarely in the Canadian documentary tradition of bearing witness with formal grace, the kind of measured humanism that programs don't make anymore.
The decision to let silence and memory do the heavy lifting instead of rushing to underscore or contextualize—that's what makes this work on a shoestring; the film trusts the audience's own weight to meet the veterans' recollection halfway.