Grenfell of Labrador: The Great Adventure
1977 · 56m · Canada
Directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
English doctor and missionary Wilfred Grenfell cruises Newfoundland and Labrador from 1892, building hospitals, nursing stations, and an orphanage financed by lecture tours. Pierre Berton narrates a life beloved locally yet marked by contrast and publicity.
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A hagiography dressed up as historical documentary—exactly the kind of reverential, consensus-pleasing biography that proves why most people sleep through NFB archives. The tension between Grenfell's genuine humanitarian work and his relentless self-promotion deserves a film willing to interrogate it, not genuflect.
Macartney-Filgate's restraint is the film's spine: Berton's narration never overreaches, the archival material breathes, and the contradiction between Grenfell's missionary impulse and his hunger for public validation emerges through careful juxtaposition rather than editorial hand-wringing. It's canonically rigorous work that trusts the tradition of the biographical documentary to hold complexity.
The decision to let Berton's voice carry ambivalence—neither condemning nor absolving Grenfell's need for celebrity—does the real work here; a lesser film would have seized the moral high ground, but this one hangs in the tension between two truths and lets that friction become the whole argument.