Why Canada?
1965 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Edmund Reid
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Newcomers from nearly ten countries explain why they chose Canada and how they built small businesses there, among them a Danish lamp maker, an Italian glass-maker, a German barber and an Englishman who repairs car bodies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A National Film Board doc from '65 about immigrants opening shops—sounds like the most establishment-approved, consensus-safe premise imaginable, which is exactly why it probably does something genuinely weird with the form that nobody's talking about.
Reid's film sits squarely in the postwar documentary tradition of the NFB, where the observational portrait becomes a meditation on national identity and labor; the formal restraint—letting craftspeople speak through their work rather than voice-over—marks this as considered filmmaking aware of its own documentary lineage.
The decision to let the lamp maker, glass-maker, and barber define Canada through their hands and their choices rather than their words is what transforms a straightforward immigration story into something tactile and singular.