New Home in the West
1943 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Dallas Jones
Genres: documentary, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
The first Ukrainian settlers arrive in Canada with little money or equipment and, through collective family labour, help open the Canadian West to new communities.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1943 NFB doc about Ukrainian settlers opening the West—sounds like the most consensus, establishment-friendly premise imaginable, and it probably is, which is exactly why I'm not touching it.
Dallas Jones crafts a formally precise document of collective resilience that situates itself squarely in the National Film Board's humanist tradition; the film's restraint and attention to labour as both physical and social act places it in meaningful conversation with Depression-era documentary practice.
The film's refusal to isolate individual heroism—letting the camera linger on the *repetition* of family work rather than the breakthrough moment—is a quiet formal choice that transforms what could've been uplift propaganda into something closer to the actual texture of survival.