Winter Week-end
1952 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Bernard Devlin
In this short comedy, a group of skiers spending a weekend in the Gatineaus are beset by mishaps and never actually make it onto the hill, yet enjoy themselves all the same.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1952 short about skiers who never ski sounds like a premise built to fail, which is exactly why it works—a negation premise before anyone was calling them that. Devlin's bet that the anticipation *is* the sport reveals something genuinely contrarian about what comedy can do with genre expectation.
Winter Week-end sits comfortably in the NFB's tradition of observational comedy and humanist short-form storytelling, where mishap becomes a vehicle for character and the failure to reach the destination is the whole point. The whimsy here is earned through disciplined comic construction, not accident.
What makes this land is the decision to keep the camera patient on the group's small defeats rather than cut away to compensate—Devlin lets the mundane pile up until it becomes its own kind of slapstick, a formal choice that transforms a modest premise into something oddly affecting.