New Faces Come Back
1946 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Richard Jarvis
Genres: documentary, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, tender
A Canadian flight engineer badly disfigured in a plane crash undergoes plastic surgery and convalescence in England, then faces anxiety and hope as he returns home to see how people will receive him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A postwar rehabilitation drama that could've been maudlin propaganda instead becomes genuinely strange—the film trusts the disfigurement as real, unresolved tension rather than a redemption arc waiting to happen, which is exactly the kind of refusal most period docs don't have the nerve for.
Jarvis's restraint here is the entire formal achievement: the way he locates drama in small domestic returns and medical waiting rather than catharsis, positioning this within a quiet lineage of British postwar cinema that treats recovery as process, not plot point—beautifully situated craft.
The decision to shoot the actual plastic surgeon's work and convalescence footage alongside the dramatic reconstruction keeps the film's emotional stakes from ever calcifying into sentiment; it's the unglamorous specificity of medical detail that makes the homecoming anxiety feel earned and singular.