Gone Curling
1963 · 10m · Canada
Directed by John Howe
A visitor to the Prairies slowly succumbs to the local cult of curling, studying the game, buying gear, and taking lessons. The comedy records a rookie's first match from a rink-side view.
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A 1963 NFB doc-comedy about curling sounds like the safest possible premise, which is exactly why Howe's deadpan approach to the sport's quasi-religious grip on Prairie life actually works—he's smuggling absurdist anthropology inside the most boring-seeming subject imaginable.
Gone Curling sits comfortably within the NFB's tradition of wry institutional documentary, using the rink as a stage for observational humor that feels effortlessly crafted; it's the kind of period short that rewards close attention to how Howe frames ritual and belonging through the mundane grammar of sport.
What makes this work isn't the curling itself but the decision to shoot from rink-side—keeping us at the visitor's exact angle of bewilderment and gradual conversion, so the sport's geometry becomes the film's actual narrative engine.