Making Movie History: Jean Roy
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Denys Desjardins
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative
Cinematographer Jean Roy shoots Inuit culture in the Arctic at age twenty and later leads the NFB camera department and its independent-film support programme.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A reverent institutional hagiography dressed up as documentary—exactly the kind of consensus-friendly heritage piece that makes Felix's skin crawl, even if the subject matter (Arctic cinema, the NFB's aesthetic DNA) deserves less polite treatment.
Desjardins traces Roy's arc with the formal restraint of a true archival documentarian, positioning a cinematographer's eye within the lineage of Canadian non-fiction film and the institution that shaped it—a film about cinema history that understands its own place in that genealogy.
The structural choice to let Roy's own camera work—those pristine Arctic frames from seventy years ago—do the biographical heavy lifting rather than rely on talking heads or voiceover is elegant, though the film plays it safe enough that even that decision doesn't quite break through the surface.