Donald Brittain Movies

Features clips from 21 documentary and animation film classics, interviews with NFB filmmakers past and present, and incisive commentary from film...

Everything seems normal at a hockey arena until the roof, straining under the weight of the ice and snow that has built up, finally gives way,...

Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, who now resides on the island of Hydra in Greece, is shown in his native city of Montreal. The program explores Cohen's...

In Part 1 of this 3-part documentary series, director Donald Brittain chronicles the early years of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and René...

A Jewish Holocaust survivor travels through Germany recalling scenes from his memory. This documentary follows a Holocaust survivor in 1965 on an...

A middle-aged family man and high school teacher struggles in silence as he accepts the fact that he is gay.

A biography of Enrico Fermi, the scientist who discovered the chain reaction in nuclear physics. Follows his career in Italy and later in America,...

April - November 1940. With devastating speed Germany takes Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Italy declares war.

This short documentary profiles a group of men from the Toronto Lakeshore Oldtimers Hockey Club. Although middle-aged, they still play the game with...

This film is a short documentary portrait of economist, technologist and lecturer Fritz Schumacher. Up to age 45, Schumacher was dedicated to...

A film biography of Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who served with the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and with the North Chinese...

In 1934, Elzire Dionne delivered five identical girls. The Dionne Quintuplets follows Cecile, Emilie, Marie, Yvonne and Annette through twenty-one...

This short animated film is about Wop May, one of Canada's leading bush pilots in the 1920s.

In this feature documentary, American community organizer and writer Saul Alinsky goes to war against the conditions that keep the poor in poverty....

This film is a revealing portrait of a tough cop with a big heart. Sergeant Bernie "Whistling" Smith walks the beat on Vancouver's Eastside, the...

Family offers a candid look at CBC Radio in action and the unique cast of characters who make up Canada's coast-to-coast radio family. The film...

In this Academy Award–nominated animated satire, Martian observers analyze life on Earth and reach a startling conclusion: automobiles appear...

At twenty-six, Noel Starblanket was one of the youngest Indigenous chiefs in North America--twice elected chief of the Starblanket Reserve, and also...

Through rare film footage and interviews with some of the pioneers who made film history, this documentary traces the history of filmmaking in Canada...

First Stop, China is a record of the choreographed performances and the unrehearsed moments of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens ballet company on the...