Gateway to Asia
1945 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Tom Daly
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
High-speed planes shrink the distance between British Columbia and Russia, China, and India, making the province Canada's Pacific gateway. The survey covers people, resources, and industries alongside the imprisonment of Japanese citizens and the lives of Chinese and Indian migrants.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1945 NFB survey that wants to sell you on BC's industrial destiny—except it can't help but expose the machinery of exclusion running underneath; the film's own propaganda instincts collide with the reality of Japanese internment camps in frame, which is genuinely more interesting than whatever it was trying to say.
Daly's work sits squarely in the documentary tradition of state-sanctioned surveying, but its formal tensions—the gap between celebratory narration and the visual record of displaced peoples—create an unintended archive that demands curatorial attention as a historical document of how cinema itself participated in selective nation-building.
What saves this from period-piece obscurity is the mounting cognitive dissonance between the upbeat industrial montage and the persistent, unavoidable presence of the incarcerated and the marginalized; that friction—whether intentional or not—is the film's only honest choice, and it's doing the work no amount of budget could buy.