Movies: Ron Alexander

At the instigation of the filmmakers, the young men of the Ile-aux-Coudres in the middle of the St-Lawrence River try as a memorial to their ancestors to revive the fishing of the belugas interrupted in 1924....

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 small cult following. Documenting this mobile production in fascinating and unexpected detail, Buster K...

Two ballet dancers perform a dance enhanced with surreal after-image visuals....

A teenage boy rebels against parental authority and must face a harsh reality when he tries to live on his own....

An engineer from Paris flies to Montreal, partly on business, partly in search of parents displaced by World War II, and partly because of the prevailing restlessness of the age....

A boy's carved boat travels through the Canadian wilderness until it reaches the ocean....

On Christmas Eve, snowplow driver Leo races to clear the streets of Montreal and complete his holiday shopping in time for midnight Mass. The feature directorial debut of celebrated filmmaker Gilles Carle (The Death of a Lumberjack), The Merry World ...

This short film portrays the story of singer Paul Anka, who rose from obscurity to become the idol of millions of adolescent fans around the world. Taking a candid look at both sides of the footlights, this film examines the marketing machine behind ...

A woman's peculiar religious convictions lead her on a self-destructive path....

Three politically incorrect lesbians talk about being lesbian....

This short film is a series of vignettes of life in Saint-Henri, a Montreal working-class district, on the first day of school. From dawn to midnight, we take in the neighbourhood’s pulse: a mother fussing over children, a father's enforced idleness,...

This short documentary records the celebration and ritual surrounding a snowshoe competition in Sherbrooke in the late 1950s. The film marked the beginning of a new approach to reality in documentary and prefigures the trademark style of the NFB's ne...

A classic NFB documentary about the Golden Gloves boxing tournament, the Canadian amateur's hope for success in the boxing world. This Gilles Groulx film shows three Montreal boxers in training. In behind-the-scenes interviews they talk about their a...

The story of two young women who go to the city to work in a dress factory, and who share a room to ease their expenses and their loneliness. The film shows the currents that brought them together and the facets of their natures that first made them ...

A Trip Down Memory Lane is a 1965 experimental collage film by Arthur Lipsett, created by editing together images and sound clips from over fifty years of newsreel footage. The film combines footage from a beauty contest, religious procession, failed...

In this short film, a young man, a girl and a dog attempt to fly with wings more symbolic than practical....

Toronto is regarded as the third largest jazz centre in North America. This film features a cross-section of jazz bands of that city: the Lenny Breau Trio, the Don Thompson Quintet and the Alf Jones Quartet. Their styles show creative self-expression...

Four years after Pour la suite du monde (1963), director Pierre Perrault asks Alexis Tremblay if he'll agree to travel with his wife Marie to the country of their ancestors, France. In a montage parallel, we follow them in France and listen to them t...

This documentary is an informal portrait of the great modern composer Igor Stravinsky. Proudly American, though still very much an Old World figure with a long and alert memory for people and events in music, literature and art, Stravinsky is depicte...

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. Nothing here is quite the same as seen before, even Niagara Falls. Canadians will be thrilled by this pa...