Growing Up Canadian: Family
2003 · 46m · Canada
Directed by Susan Terrill
Genres: documentary, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Canadians recall making underwear from flour sacks, scrounging coal, and the rituals and discipline of mostly poor families in the century's first half. Homes, cars, and neighbourhoods change as the country moves from rural dominion to urban nation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a 46-minute oral history from the NFB that does everything you'd expect—gather grandmas, collect nostalgic anecdotes, smooth them into a narrative arc about Canadian nation-building. Competent, maybe even touching, but there's nothing here that makes me lean forward.
Terrill locates this film within the documentary tradition of the NFB itself—a formal lineage of social portraiture and temporal witness—and the restraint of the edit, letting voices layer against archival photography and domestic space, positions memory as something constructed rather than simply recalled, which is the kind of considered formalism that sustains a long-form essay.
The structural choice to let visual transition—homes, cars, neighbourhoods shifting across decades—carry the thematic weight rather than narration creates a kind of spatial argument about modernization that a smaller crew could rarely afford to build with such deliberation.