Ready When You Are
1975 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Douglas Kiefer, John N. Smith
Genres: comedy, documentary
An NFB camera team tries to stage a huge musical number with a thousand Halifax schoolchildren playing ukuleles on a dockyard pier. Passing warships, aircraft, tugboats, unreliable communications, and basic logistics turn the pre-digital shoot into comic chaos.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1975 NFB doc that treats a thousand ukulele-playing schoolchildren like an obstacle course instead of inspiration—the real subject isn't the musical number, it's watching a pre-digital production collapse into beautiful entropy. Everyone else would've cut this down to a earnest making-of; Kiefer and Smith found the comedy in failure itself.
Positioned within the NFB's documentary tradition but subverting the form's earnestness through structural absurdism, the film demonstrates considerable formal control in its escalating chaos—each logistics mishap lands with the precision of a Buster Keaton bit, suggesting a deliberate compositional hand beneath the apparent disorder.
The entire film pivots on one decision: treating the warships, aircraft, and tugboats as collaborators rather than interruptions, letting reality's indifference become the actual score. That choice—refusing to reshoots or studio control—transforms a logistical nightmare into something with genuine texture that a million-dollar production couldn't buy.