John A. Macdonald: The Impossible Idea
1961 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Gordon Burwash
Genres: biography, drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, theatrical
John A. Macdonald pushes his vision of a dominion stretching from sea to sea, pressing forward through political opposition that mocks the plan as empty fantasy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1961 NFB biography of a dead politician? Sounds like the opposite of subversive—until you realize Burwash is using theatrical formalism to make the impossible idea *feel* impossible, which is genuinely perverse for a historical doc.
Burwash positions this within the NFB's own pedagogical lineage while staging Macdonald's vision theatrically rather than naturalistically; it's a film acutely aware of how cinema can embody political abstraction as dramatic form.
The choice to render a nation-building fantasy through theatrical staging rather than archive footage transforms what could've been rote civics into something genuinely strange—that formal gamble on a modest budget is where this film actually lives.