The Accessible Arctic
1967 · 23m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
This documentary shows how new roads, railways, and airfields were opening Canada's far north to industry and settlement, focusing on the workers leading the change, including Inuit and First Nations graduates of new trade schools.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1967 NFB doc about infrastructure and industrial progress—sounds like establishment propaganda, but the weird tension between development rhetoric and the actual faces of Inuit and First Nations workers making it happen gives it a subversive edge the filmmakers probably didn't intend.
A formally composed historical document that positions itself squarely in the NFB tradition of state-sponsored cinema, yet its careful attention to the workers themselves—particularly Indigenous voices navigating these systems—reveals an unstated critique of progress narratives that rewards close viewing.
The choice to center Inuit and First Nations trade school graduates as the protagonists of their own displacement is both generous and quietly devastating; it's a small formal decision that upends the entire paternalistic frame a film like this could've occupied.