Flight
1967 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Josef Reeve
Genres: adventure, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, sensual
Gliders ride the air over the Laurentian and Rocky mountains, poised engineless between earth and sky. The film offers a soaring journey meant to stir the appetite for adventure.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A seven-minute ode to engineless flight that plays it completely straight—no irony, no deconstruction, just a 1967 NFB production doing exactly what it says on the tin. It's so earnestly committed to the sublime that it loops back around to being genuinely weird, which I respect, but it's not subversive enough to be interesting.
Reeve's control of aerial cinematography and the contemplative pacing situates this firmly in the NFB's tradition of poetic documentaries—the sensual languor of the image, the restraint in the cut, the refusal to oversell the spectacle all point to a filmmaker deeply aware of how to compose reverie. This is craft in service of a specific philosophical stance about humanity's relationship to space.
The entire film hinges on a single decision: to let the gliders drift without musical manipulation or dramatic narration, trusting the white noise of wind and the geometry of light on canvas to carry it—that restraint is what makes seven minutes of soaring actually breathtaking instead of tedious.