With the Canadians in Korea
1952 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Julian Biggs
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative
Front-line footage and a serviceman's firsthand recollections depict daily life and combat duties for Canada's 25th Infantry Brigade serving during the Korean War.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1952 NFB war doc—exactly the kind of archival restraint most people fall asleep through—except Biggs lets the serviceman's voice drift over combat footage like he's not sure which one is actually telling the truth. It's almost a essay film pretending to be a bulletin.
Biggs situates this squarely in the Canadian documentary tradition—the marriage of observational footage and intimate testimony that the NFB perfected—where the formal restraint *is* the argument about how we remember war, not the war itself.
The key move is trusting the gap between what we see and what the narrator remembers; most war docs underline the match, but here Biggs lets them drift slightly apart, and suddenly you're watching memory, not just footage.