Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance

The scouts

Everyone watches this as a triumphant modernist narrative, but Boyko's actually documenting the psychic violence of erasure — the film *wants* you to celebrate the clean lines while it's quietly mourning what got demolished. Subversive precisely because it wears the propaganda like a costume.

A structurally rigorous film that understands its place in the documentary lineage — how to film progress, how to frame aspiration — and does so with the formal clarity of mid-century NFB craft at its peak; the contemplative pacing lets you feel the weight of the before and after.

The decision to hold on the empty lots and half-demolished buildings before cutting to the gleaming new development is what haunts this whole thing — one editing choice that transforms what could've been cheerful promotional material into something genuinely elegiac.