Wings of Youth
1940 · 17m · Canada
Directed by Raymond Spottiswoode
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative
As Britain faced the threat of bomb, fire and poison gas, this wartime film shows Canada building the airfields, aircraft and equipment needed for the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme, which trained thousands of fliers a year.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1940 NFB industrial documentary about airfields and training schemes sounds like the kind of consensus-safe archive content everyone's supposed to genuflect toward—and yet the *actual* film is oddly restrained, refusing the bombast you'd expect from wartime propaganda, which makes it perversely interesting precisely because it refuses to be interesting.
Spottiswoode's restraint here is the mark of a documentarian working within a clear institutional tradition—the NFB's commitment to measured observation over rhetorical grandstanding—and the film's power comes from its formal refusal of melodrama, letting the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme's scale speak through careful composition and pacing rather than patriotic fervor.
The film's real move is its decision to photograph *infrastructure* as landscape—hangars and runways given the same contemplative weight as terrain—which transforms what could be dry technical documentation into something almost elegiac, the camera finding geometry and shadow where another director would've settled for informational flatness.