The New Schoolhouse
1995 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Jocelyn Rehder
Genres: drama, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
In an 1850s Ontario village, three young children watch their whole community come together to build a new schoolhouse and celebrate its opening day.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A feel-good period piece about community barn-raising? Pass—unless Rehder's doing something genuinely perverse with the nostalgia, and I don't see evidence she is here.
Rehder's restraint is the whole film: watching children's wonder register through minimal gesture and compositional clarity, rooted in a clear lineage of NFB documentarian realism and the pastoral tradition of mid-century Canadian cinema.
The decision to keep the camera at child-height throughout transforms what could've been a sentimental heritage film into something tactile and intimate—you're not observing the schoolhouse being built, you're inside the scale of their discovery.