New England and New France (1490-1763)
1967 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Ronald Dick, Pierre L'Amare
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
From first contact to final conflict, New England and New France struggle for dominance in North America, including an economic rivalry between the St. Lawrence trade system and the Atlantic-Hudson system.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1967 NFB historical survey sounds like exactly the kind of staid institutional doc everyone's supposed to respect, but there's something almost perverse about how Dick and L'Amare make colonial trade systems *matter*—the economic skeleton under all those frontier narratives everyone else ignores.
This is the kind of archival rigor and historiographic clarity that defines the NFB's documentary tradition at its most sophisticated; the formal restraint—letting economic systems rather than drama carry the narrative—positions it as a significant meditation on how power actually structures colonial space.
The decision to build the entire 57-minute argument around competing trade networks rather than military spectacle or individual actors is what makes this work; it's a single structural choice that reframes how you see the entire period, and on a mid-60s budget, that's everything.