Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine
1962 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Patry
Genres: biography, drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, tense
Beginning on the day of his death, the life of chief justice Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine flashes back to tense moments in his defence of French Canada.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1962 NFB biography that plays it completely straight—no irony, no formal games, just a dead man and his flashbacks. I'd normally dismiss this as institutional hagiography, but there's something almost perverse about how earnestly it commits to the form; it's either genuinely subversive or it doesn't know what it is, and I'm not sure which interests me more.
Patry's *Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine* is a textbook example of the documentary-drama hybrid that NFB pioneered—structured as a reverse-chronology meditation on a life of constitutional defense, it sits comfortably in the lineage of mid-century CBC-influenced civic portraiture, all measured pacing and considered montage.
The decision to begin at death and move backward through tense political moments creates a specific gravitational pull: we're always descending toward something, each flashback another layer of justification, and that structural choice does the thematic work better than any voiceover could.