The War Is Over
1945 · 4m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Scenes of celebration mark V-J Day in 1945, with the suggestion that the mining, farming and industrial energy Canada poured into the war will now build a brighter peacetime future.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A state-sponsored victory lap dressed up as documentary—exactly the kind of consensus mythology Felix would normally demolish, except the film's aware enough of its own propaganda to become accidentally interesting; the gap between triumphant montage and the unspoken costs is doing something the makers didn't intend.
A canonical artifact of the National Film Board's documentary tradition, where formal optimism and montage craft converge to articulate a postwar vision; the film's place in the lineage of institutional cinema is precisely what makes its assumptions worth examining now.
The decision to soundtrack industrial conversion footage with the same celebratory tone as street parties—rather than complicating it—is the hinge the whole thing turns on, and whether that's naiveté or irony depends entirely on what you hear in that choice.