Fighting Norway
1943 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Sydney Newman
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
Norwegian patriots strike at occupying German forces while Norwegian airmen train in Canada alongside Allied crews. The wartime film links resistance at home to a growing friendship between Norway and Canada.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1943 NFB propaganda film about Norwegian resistance—sounds like exactly the kind of consensus pick everyone expects, and that's precisely why it bores me; there's nothing here subverting the doc-as-rallying-cry formula that was already calcified by wartime.
Newman's decision to intercut Norwegian homefront sabotage with Canadian airfield training creates a formal dialogue between two nations' sacrifice that sits elegantly within the wartime documentary tradition, and the film's restraint in tone—contemplative rather than bombastic—shows real curatorial awareness of how to honor its subjects without rhetorical excess.
The linking device between resistance fighters and airmen could've collapsed into montage cliché, but there's a specificity in how the editing lets us feel the parallel tension—the waiting, the small acts—that suggests Newman understood the emotional architecture of separated struggle rather than just its propaganda utility.