Redevelopment in Windsor - The First Step
1964 · 13m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Windsor, Ontario tackles aging districts by using provincial and federal support to launch Glengarry Court, an early low-rent housing development. Officials then consider extending renewal plans toward a valuable stretch of riverfront.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straightforward civic boosterism doc from 1964—exactly the kind of earnest institutional film everyone expects from the NFB—but there's something almost perverse about watching bureaucrats genuinely believe urban renewal is salvation before history proves them catastrophically wrong, and that dramatic irony is doing the real work here.
This is essential mid-century Canadian documentary craft: measured observation of the welfare state at its most optimistic, shot and edited with the restrained formality of the Grierson tradition, and it positions itself perfectly in the lineage of state-commissioned films wrestling with the tension between progress and place.
The decision to linger on the riverfront—to let the camera dwell on what's about to be sacrificed rather than celebrating what's being built—quietly inverts the entire promotional brief and transforms this from propaganda into elegy.