Making Movie History: Robert Forget
2014 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Denys Desjardins
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative
Producer Robert Forget is profiled for a career pushing new technology at the NFB, from founding the Vidéographe centre to leading its French program, advancing computer animation, and pioneering online distribution.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight institutional profile of a tech pioneer at the NFB—competent, but it's doing exactly what you'd expect a documentary about a documentary-maker to do, which is precisely why it doesn't interest me.
Desjardins constructs a genealogy of technological and curatorial innovation at the NFB through Forget's career arc, situating him within a lineage of institutional vision that shaped Canadian cinema itself—formally modest but historically rigorous.
The film's real strength is in how it lets Forget's own archival footage and the tools he championed do the talking; there's a quiet formal choice here to let technological history narrate itself rather than imposing a conventional biographical through-line.