Howard
1957 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Don Haldane
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Recent graduate Howard wants to spend the summer travelling across Canada with a friend, but his conformist parents insist he head straight to college and a chemistry career.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1957 NFB doc about a kid wanting to road-trip instead of pre-med feels like the safest coming-of-age premise imaginable—and yet Haldane somehow makes the generational standoff genuinely unsettling, stripping away the sentimentality everyone expects from this exact story.
Haldane situates this squarely in the Canadian documentary tradition of intimate social observation, using measured pacing and naturalistic portraiture to transform a domestic conflict into a formal statement about conformity and desire—the kind of structural restraint that deepens rather than diminishes the emotional weight.
The film's power lives in its refusal of dramatic confrontation; instead Haldane lets long silences and Howard's half-articulated yearnings carry the argument, a formal choice that makes the quiet moments between characters feel more urgent than any staged conflict could.