Family: A Loving Look at CBC Radio
1991 · 49m · Canada
Directed by Donald Brittain, Robert Duncan
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
CBC Radio staff across six time zones produce live national programming under relentless deadlines. The film follows the personalities and history behind Canada's coast-to-coast radio family.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 49-minute love letter to institutional radio feels like the exact opposite of subversive, but Brittain and Duncan's refusal to puncture the myth—to find the cracks in the 'family'—is almost perverse in its commitment to earnestness; it's so sincere it loops back around to weird.
This is essential archival filmmaking in the documentary-essay tradition, positioned squarely in the lineage of institutional portraiture; Brittain's formal control and the film's architectural approach to geographic and temporal structure demonstrate how to honor a subject without sentimentalizing it.
The decision to follow six time zones simultaneously rather than collapse them into a single narrative creates a rhythmic, almost musical simultaneity that turns deadline pressure into formal structure—that one choice transforms what could be a standard institutional doc into something genuinely hypnotic.