Impressions of Expo 67
1967 · 8m · Canada
Directed by William Brind
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: theatrical, whimsical
Montreal at its most lively hosts Expo 67, as this invitation film presents impressions of the World's Fair that drew more than 50 million visitors to the city.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's basically a corporate tourism film, which should bore me senseless — but Brind's refusal to let the spectacle sit still, the way he keeps cutting away from the obvious monuments to catch some kid's bewildered face or a crowd's edges, feels like subversion by restlessness, which is its own kind of contraband.
Brind positions this invitation film firmly in the lineage of NFB modernism—the whimsical formalism of mid-century documentarians—where the fair itself becomes pretext for studying how cinema can frame collective euphoria through editing rhythm and tonal surprise rather than narrative.
The singular move here is the sound design—layering fair ambient noise, snippets of voices, and music in a way that dissolves the boundary between documentary observation and impressionistic dreamscape, which on an 8-minute, presumably modest-budget film is where the whole spell lives.