Target - Berlin
1944 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Ernest Borneman
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
This wartime documentary tells the story of Canada's first large Lancaster bomber, from the workers who built it and the crew who ferried it overseas to its first combat flight over Berlin.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1944 wartime doc about Lancaster bombers sounds like the most conventional propaganda imaginable, and yet Borneman somehow treats the assembly line and the crew with genuine uncertainty—there's a refusal to mythologize that sneaks past the genre's own expectations.
This is essential lineage work: a document of industrial craft and martial purpose that sits squarely in the documentary tradition of the 1940s, with the restraint and architectural clarity you'd expect from the NFB at its most rigorous—a film conscious of its own historical weight.
The decision to hold on the workers' hands as they assemble each component, rather than montaging through the build, transforms what could be rote process footage into something intimate and mortal; it's where the film finds its actual subject.