Singing Stars of Tomorrow
1947 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Harry Alpert
Genres: documentary, musical
Tones: tender, theatrical
Four prize winners from a 1944 radio singing contest perform individual selections, with singers from Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto presenting pieces ranging from French song to operatic aria.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1947 radio contest doc should be dead weight, but there's something genuinely perverse about how tenderly Alpert frames these young singers—he's not mocking the earnestness, he's venerating it, which is either deeply sincere or deeply weird, and I can't decide which.
Alpert's decision to let each singer occupy their own theatrical space within the documentary form—moving from French chanson to operatic aria without irony or commentary—positions this as a small but precise argument about voice as artifact, one that situa itself in a lineage of NFB's humanist documentary practice.
The restraint of the staging is what kills here: no orchestra swells, no crowd noise, just the singer and the space around them, which means every vocal choice, every breath, has to carry the entire film—and somehow these four amateurs from 1944 do exactly that.