The Rise and Fall of English Montreal
1993 · 50m · Canada
Directed by William Weintraub
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
As hundreds of thousands of anglophones depart Montreal amid Quebec's growing French nationalism, former and remaining residents recall an earlier era of English dominance and debate the city's capacity for renewal.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Weintraub's doing the thing everyone expects—elegiac nostalgia for a vanished Anglo establishment—which means the film's real move, if it has one, is buried under decades of "remember when Montreal was ours" sentiment; I'd rather watch something that actually *wants* to provoke than something that just *is* provocative by accident of history.
A masterwork of essayistic architecture: Weintraub assembles testimony, archival material, and urban elegy into a formal argument about linguistic dominance and collective memory that refuses easy resolution—the kind of structurally rigorous documentary that defines the NFB's curatorial legacy and demands serious reckoning with what it means to lose a city you thought you owned.
The edit is doing almost all the work here—every cut between an interview subject's recollection and a photograph of a shuttered storefront or abandoned theater carries the weight of irretrievable time, and that rhythmic counterpoint between voice and image is what transforms personal loss into something universal about displacement.