This Is Our Canada
1945 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Stanley Jackson
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative
A wartime portrait traces Canada's history and then shows the resources, industries, people and ways of life strengthened as the country mobilised during the Second World War.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1945 NFB propaganda doc about Canada's war effort—exactly the kind of institutional consensus film that usually makes me want to flee the room, but Jackson's formal control over the montage and his refusal to sentimentalize the labor actually creates something unsettling beneath the patriotic surface.
This sits precisely in the lineage of wartime documentary craft that established the NFB's reputation for visual rigor; Jackson's measured pacing and his architectural approach to interweaving historical archive with contemporary industrial footage demonstrates the formal sophistication that defined mid-century Canadian documentary.
The decision to let the machinery and landscape compositions carry the emotional weight rather than rely on voiceover manipulation shows remarkable restraint for a propaganda piece—it's a small choice that elevates what could've been pure cheerleading into something architecturally honest.