Wartime Housing
1943 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Graham McInnes
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative
This wartime short shows how rapid industrial growth during the Second World War created an urgent need for worker housing, met by building small prefabricated homes quickly in cities and outlying areas.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
McInnes makes a propagandist doc about prefab housing sound like the most seditious thing ever filmed—watching bureaucracy and industrial speed get aestheticized with this much formal precision is genuinely disorienting, which is exactly why it shouldn't work but does.
A masterclass in the Canadian documentary tradition: McInnes frames wartime pragmatism through measured observation and geometric compositions that treat housing policy like architecture worth seeing, positioning this short in direct lineage with the best of the NFB's mid-century social documentaries.
The decision to let the buildings themselves—their repetition, their prefab geometry—become the visual argument rather than leaning on interviews or narration overexplanation is what makes this feel urgent and modern despite being eighty years old.