Donald Brittain Movies

A portrait of John Grierson, the first Canadian Government Film Commissioner and founder of the National Film Board in 1939. Interweaving archival...

In this hybrid of animation and live-action, a counterculture monkey blows the studio's budget directing a bizarre fantasy film, which is actually an...

In Montréal, Jean-Pierre is fired on the set of a TV commercial where he's an apprentice technician. He's penniless, behind on his rent, with...

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

A 1964 documentary portrait of Cohen in his pre-musician days as a poet and stand-up comedian.

In the fall of 1964, just over a year before his death, Buster Keaton traveled to Canada to make The Railrodder, a short subject that now enjoys a...

A biographical drama that profiles the life of Hal C. Banks, a controversial American labour union leader, who came to Canada in 1949 to lead a...

A view from a helicopter of the ten Canadian provinces in 1966. The result is a big, beautiful and engrossing bird's-eye portrait of the country....

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

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,...

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

Bureaucracy shapes our lives and guides us from the cradle to the grave. This documentary lays bare the idiosyncrasies of bureaucracy, whether in...

A study of the automobile and its pervasive effect on the history of North America. Focusing on the Ford dynasty, from the original Henry car through...

A retrospective of documentary films by Donald Brittain offering a glimpse of the man and the restless energy that informed his work. Dedicated and...

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

Part documentary/part dramatization, this film details several of the highest-profile unsolved cases of disappearances, mysterious changes in...

This documentary is an informal portrait of the great modern composer Igor Stravinsky. Proudly American, though still very much an Old World figure...

This feature documentary traces the political career of T.C. (Tommy) Douglas, former premier of Saskatchewan and leader of the New Democratic Party,...

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

In this experimental collage film, Arthur Lipsett reworks over fifty years of newsreel footage into a surreal audiovisual montage of...