Helicopter Canada
1966 · 50m · Canada
Directed by Eugene Boyko
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
An aerial helicopter journey surveys all ten Canadian provinces in 1966, offering a bird's-eye portrait prepared for the centennial year.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight documentary survey of ten provinces from a helicopter—it's the opposite of subversive, which is almost admirable in its refusal to perform radicalism for a state centennial. But honestly, it's too earnest and too embedded in the institutional machinery for me to champion; there's no premise here that breaks the frame.
A canonical artifact of the NFB's mid-century documentary tradition, positioned squarely in the lineage of nation-building cinema and aerial survey work—the formal rigor of covering all ten provinces in a single continuous gaze, the compositional precision of that bird's-eye framing, makes this essential viewing for understanding how documentary shaped national identity in 1966.
The singular choice here is trusting the helicopter itself as both camera operator and narrative structure—no voice-over hierarchy, just the machine's own vantage point cutting through ten provinces—and that constraint, that willingness to let geography and altitude do the storytelling work, elevates what could've been a bureaucratic travelogue into something genuinely meditative.