Making Movie History: Wartime Women
2014 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Joanne Robertson
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Women who worked at the NFB during the Second World War are remembered in an ensemble portrait recalling their central role in building the institution.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight-ahead institutional hagiography dressed up as recovery work—the kind of reverential oral history that asks nothing uncomfortable about what it means to celebrate women's labor within a state apparatus. Pass.
Robertson's formal restraint—letting archival material and voice breathe without narrative scaffolding—locates these women within the documentary tradition they themselves helped codify at the NFB, a lineage made visible through its own aesthetic choices.
The decision to let silences sit between testimonies, rather than stitching them into seamless narrative, somehow makes the women's individual presences more vivid than any montage could—it's that specific pacing choice that makes the ensemble feel like actual people, not a monument.