Winter Driving: Keep Your Cool
1978 · 25m · Canada
Genres: documentary
An instructional film presents winter-driving dos and don'ts for the rough months ahead, building on basic safe-driving habits to help drivers cope with snow and ice conditions.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1978 NFB safety instructional? Sounds like wallpaper until you realize it's a deadpan subversion of the form itself—the kind of pedagogical earnestness that becomes genuinely uncanny when watched forty-five years later, like found-footage horror but the horror is just *sincerity*.
This sits squarely in the NFB's documentary-didactic tradition, where formal rigor and public service merge into something architecturally beautiful; the discipline of the instructional form becomes the point, and the editing's restraint is its own argument about how to *see* winter driving as a problem worth solving.
The real lift here is probably in how it trusts silence and real road footage over voiceover panic—letting the winter conditions speak, the drivers' actual mistakes play out—so that by minute twelve you're not being lectured, you're *watching* the problem, which is a single structural choice that separates this from a thousand other safety films.