Challenge for Change / Société Nouvelle

Released in 1968 and often referred to as Canada’s first music video, The Ballad of Crowfoot was directed by Willie Dunn, a Mi’kmaq/Scottish folk singer and activist who was part of the historic Indian Film Crew, the first all-Indigenous production unit at the NFB. The film is a powerful look at colonial betrayals, told through a striking montage of archival images and a ballad composed by Dunn himself about the legendary 19th-century Siksika (Blackfoot) chief who negotiated Treaty 7 on behalf of the Blackfoot Confederacy. The IFC’s inaugural release, Crowfoot was the first Indigenous-directed film to be made at the NFB.

This NFB docu-drama takes an unvarnished look at life in a working-class boarding house. Based on the filmmaker's memories of his own mother's boarding house in Cabbagetown, Toronto, the story revolves around Rose and how she runs her establishment. With a household as full and varied as hers, domesticity clashes with disputes about bootlegging, violence, and stealing. Even authority isn't exempt: she does battle with a social worker over her son's theft of a bicycle. Rose is the queen of her castle, and delivers her own brand of justice.

A critical look at marriage and motherhood through the views of a group of young girls and boys and a group of married women, contrasted with glossy advertisements extolling romance, weddings and babies. The film ends with the thought that the solution could be growing up before marriage.

Joy is a research biologist, a consultant to a large company. She is also a widow with two school-age children. In discussing her own dilemmas she speaks for many other women. "The powers that be know that women do work, but they turn a deaf ear." Apart from "discrimination against women," Joy sees the absence of universal day care as a loss for children too.

Using video recording technology, the citizens of Rosedale, once referred to as "the rear end of Alberta" by a frustrated citizen, pulled themselves together as a community. They formed a citizens' action committee, cleaned up the town, built a park, and negotiated with the government to install gas, water and sewage systems. And all this happened within five months.

This short documentary profiles a community engaged in developing sustainable living methods, including food production and small-scale solar and wind technology, on a farm in Massachusetts in the 1970s. Well before sustainability was a mainstream concern, these prescient innovators attempted to create a vision of a greener, kinder world. "Think small," say the New Alchemists. "Look what thinking big has done."