Donald Brittain Movies

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

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

This feature documentary is a fascinating and spirited portrait of the life and times of the legendary Quebec politician and four-time mayor of...

The early history of Canadian film making before the establishment of the National Film Board of Canada.

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

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...

This film shows the scientific study of fires set to buildings in Aultsville, Ontario, a town evacuated for flooding by the St. Lawrence Seaway....

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

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....

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...

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

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...

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

This 1964 documentary returns to the battlefields where over 100,000 Canadian soldiers lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars. The film...

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

Examples of prejudice that can be seen everyday

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 1968, a convoy set off to transport a Calandria, the 70-ton core of a Canadian nuclear reactor, to Rajasthan in India. Even the largest...

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

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