Growing Up Canadian: Media
2003 · 46m · Canada
Directed by Susan Terrill
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Children encounter the telephone, movies, television, and computers for the first time while parents grow suspicious of each new medium. Canadians remember the books, radio, programs, and films that connected them to a widening world.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 46-minute NFB nostalgia exercise about media anxiety—it's the safe, consensus pick, the kind of thing that plays well at heritage screenings but never asks *why* we're romanticizing the past instead of interrogating it.
Terrill situates itself squarely in the NFB's own archival lineage, using intergenerational testimony and found media to construct a formal dialogue between technological eras; the restraint of the edit—letting silences breathe between childhood wonder and parental doubt—speaks to a filmmaker conscious of documentary tradition.
The film's real leverage isn't the nostalgic premise but the decision to let *children's* unguarded reactions to new technology play against adult retrospection—that asymmetry of wonder versus wariness does more storytelling work than the narration ever could.