 | | | Remembrance Day
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| November 11th is Remembrance Day (before known as Armistice Day). The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is suggesting a new film to mark this day, highlighting the contribution of women during the war and their invaluable part in the history of Canadian cinema.
The NFB is also celebrating its 85th anniversary this year.
Contact us at libraries@nfb.ca if you want to organize a screening.
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| | | A RETURN TO MEMORY
a film by Don McWilliams | 2024 | 116 min |
| When Canada entered World War II, the National Film Board suddenly had an urgent new mission—and hundreds of women stepped forward, helping to create Canadian cinema as we now know it.
Juxtaposing a dazzling array of archival material with dynamic animation by NFB infographics artist Mélanie Bouchard, director Donald McWilliams evokes the heady wartime years, when women played a key part in transforming the NFB into a major international studio.
With men engaged elsewhere in the war effort, hundreds of women pursued careers at the newly formed public producer—and pioneering figures like Evelyn Spice Cherry, Red Burns and Jane Marsh Beveridge made movie history, creating work that spoke to the world with a distinctive Canadian voice.
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| | | ABOUT SOME OF THE WOMEN IN THIS FILM
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| | "We learned to work with chaos." |
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| | | | Gudrun Bjerring Parker (1920–2022) |
| | Gudrun Bjerring Parker was a young newspaper reporter when she met John Grierson. Impressed by her journalistic skills, he offered her a job on his wartime team. With films like Before They Are Six (1943) and Listen to the Prairies (1945), Bjerring Parker would bring a distinctive new lyricism to the documentary form. In 1944, she was appointed head of the NFB's new Educational Unit and was able to follow her passion for education and the art of filmmaking, winning awards for Children's Concert (1949) and Opera School (1951). |
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| | Goldie "Red" Burns (born Goldie Gennis) (1925–2013) |
| | Goldie Gennis—or Red Burns, as she came to be known—was a precocious 16-year-old in 1941 when she planted herself outside Grierson's office, itching to work at the newly established public producer. When she died in 2013, The New York Times referred to her as the "Godmother of Silicon Alley," acknowledging her pioneering work in film and new media. With George Stoney, an early producer in the NFB's Challenge for Change program, Burns co-founded the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, serving as its Chair for over 20 years. |
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| | | | Evelyn Spice Cherry (1906–1990) |
| | A documentary pioneer and lifelong activist, Saskatchewan-born Evelyn Spice trained as a journalist before moving to the UK in 1931, finding work with Grierson at the GPO's newly established film unit. She impressed critics with Weather Forecast, a poetic documentary on forecasting methods. In 1941, she and her husband, fellow filmmaker Lawrence Cherry, accepted Grierson's invitation to join the NFB, where she played a key role in forging the new agency's public mandate. As co-head of the NFB Agricultural Unit, she documented the emergence of agricultural co-ops and other social issues. Her leftwing convictions became a liability during the postwar Red Scare, and in 1950 she was pressured into leaving the NFB. She and her husband later formed Cherry Films Ltd, and by the time she retired in 1985, she'd produced and/or directed over 100 films. |
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| | Alma Duncan (1917–2004) |
| Having worked as a commercial artist, Alma Duncan joined the NFB's Graphic Arts Division in 1943, designing posters and publicity materials while pursuing an active independent career, documenting aspects of the war effort through her drawings and paintings. When the Graphic Arts Division was disbanded, she moved to the animation studio, directing Folksong Fantasy (1950). In 1951, she and Audrey McLaren, a fellow NFB worker who became her life partner, founded Dunclaren Production, creating animation like Kumak the Sleepy Hunter. Duncan remained active into the 1980s, participating in exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Her work appears in numerous public collections, and in 2014 the Ottawa Art Gallery mounted a major exhibition of her work.
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| | | Evelyn Lambart (1914–1999)
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| Considered Canada's first woman animator, Evelyn Lambart was a young art school graduate when she began working at the NFB's Ottawa headquarters in 1942. Put to work on wartime newsreels, she displayed a unique talent for crafting animated maps and graphics, and in 1947 she directed her first film, an inventive educational short called The Impossible Map. She was a close collaborator of Norman McLaren and together they co-directed six films, including the extraordinary Begone Dull Care (1949). Her solo efforts include Mr. Frog Went A-Courting (1974), a masterwork of cut-out animation. Hearing impaired from a young age, she credited the condition with heightening her attention to visual detail. The NFB remained her creative home until she retired.
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| Ruby Grierson (1904–1940)
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| | Ruby Grierson, one of John Grierson's six sisters, trained as a teacher before venturing into documentary production. Working as an uncredited assistant on the seminal documentary Housing Problems, she quickly started directing her own work, socially conscious documentaries like London Wakes Up and Today and Tomorrow. By engaging her subjects, often working-class women, directly in production, Grierson anticipated the ethos of the NFB's Challenge for Change by several decades. Actively involved in the early war effort, she died in 1940, a passenger on a ship that was torpedoed during a transatlantic crossing. She was working for the NFB at the time, making a film on the wartime evacuation of British children to Canada. Released as Children from Overseas (1940), the film was initially credited to Stanley Hawes alone, but in 2020, Grierson was finally given a co-director credit. She is the subject of Fiona Adams' documentary Ruby Grierson: Reshooting History, made for BBC Scotland. |
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| | | | Don McWilliams, filmmaker (bio) |
| Donald McWilliams is a documentary filmmaker whose work makes use of both live-action and animation techniques. He was inspired to become a filmmaker after meeting Norman McLaren in 1968. McWilliams would later work with McLaren, and this led him to make two films about the acclaimed NFB animator: Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990) and Norman McLaren: Animated Musician (2014). Having also met McLaren's long-time collaborator, Evelyn Lambart, McWilliams happily agreed to make Eleven Moving Moments with Evelyn Lambart in 2017. The film gave him the opportunity to bring Lambart out of McLaren's shadow and recognize her contribution to his success, while highlighting her own beautifully crafted animation.
McWilliams' other films include a trilogy of historical film essays: The Passerby (1995), awarded Best Cultural Documentary at the 1997 Hot Docs festival and selected as one of the 50 best filmic essays by the Vienna Film Festival in 2007, The Fifth Province (2003), and A Time There Was: Stories from the Last Days of Kenya Colony (2009). McWilliams also produced and edited Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square, which was nominated for the 1999 Oscar® for Best Documentary Short.
McWilliams taught experimental animation and documentary production for several years in Norway. The Writers Guild of Canada has nominated his work twice for a best documentary script award. McWilliams has been a part of the NFB Animation Studio for close to four decades and was named Honorary President of the 2016 Ottawa International Animation Festival, a testament to his influence in animation circles.
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| | | Florence François
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| | Programming Agent, NFB |
| | 514-914-9253 |
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| | | NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA |
| | P.O. Box 6100, Station Centre-ville, Montreal (Quebec) H3C 3H5 |
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