Documentary on the Canadian career of train robber Billy Miner, who became a folk hero in British Columbia. Locations near Kamloops and Mission are explored in present day.
Charlie Johnstone
as Narrator
As the west rapidly becomes civilized, a pair of outlaws in 1890s Wyoming find themselves pursued by a posse and decide to flee to South America in hopes of evading the law.
This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.
In 1934, Elzire Dionne delivered five identical girls. The Dionne Quintuplets follows Cecile, Emilie, Marie, Yvonne and Annette through twenty-one years of strange upbringing. When the girls were just infants, the premier of Ontario issued a court order removing them from parental care. Cut off from the world and their family, over-publicized, viewed twice daily in a special viewing compound, they grew up as prize exhibits. Director Donald Brittain uses old newsreel footage, home-movie sequences and interviews to depict a historic event that became a tragic exploitation of a family.
The Indian Act, passed in Canada in 1876, made members of Aboriginal peoples second-class citizens, separated from the white population: nomadic for centuries, they were moved to reservations to control their behavior and resources; and thousands of their youngest members were separated from their families to be Christianized: a cultural genocide that still resonates in Canadian society today.
Bret Maverick is a gambler who would rather con someone than fight them, and needs an additional $3k in order to enter a winner-takes-all poker game beginning in a few days. He joins forces with a woman with a marvelous Southern accent, and the two try and enter the game.
The true story of Australia’s most notorious convict, Alexander Pearce and his infamous journey into the beautiful yet brutal Tasmanian wilderness. A point of no return for convicts banished from their homeland, Van Diemen’s Land was a feared and dreaded penal settlement at the end of the earth.
Gare uses the knowledge that his wife Amelia was imprisoned and had an illegitimate son to make her his subject. When her son Marc Jordan appears and falls in love with her daughter Judith, Amelia is forced to tell the truth. Gare then tyrannizes Judith. She tries to escape, but a fatal accident occurs first.
After escaping from jail, outlaw Wes McQueen is convinced by his old partner in crime to do one last heist.
Inspired by the true events of the infamous 1983 prison breakout of 38 IRA prisoners from HMP Maze, which was to become the biggest prison escape in Europe since World War II.
An intimate look into Demers family's experience raising children while dealing with the societal stigmas around disabilities and the consequences of Alberta's forgotten experiment in eugenics.
Rex, Slim and the boys are fired by a wealthy rancher but decide to help him out when his daughter intends on marrying a shifty, gold-digging actor. Meanwhile, the rancher's foreman executes plans for a train robbery.
After handing in a report on the treatment of Chinese colonial labor, Kaji is offered the post of labor chief at a large mining operation in Manchuria, which also grants him exemption from military service. He accepts, and moves to Manchuria with his newly-wed wife Michiko, but when he tries to put his ideas of more humane treatment into practice, he finds himself at odds with scheming officials, cruel foremen, and the military police.
Women have always sought ways to terminate unwanted pregnancies, despite powerful patriarchal structures and systems working against them. This film provides a historical overview of how church, state and the medical establishment have determined policies concerning abortion. From this cross-cultural survey--filmed in Ireland, Japan, Thailand, Peru, Colombia, and Canada--emerges one reality: only a small percentage of the world's women has access to safe, legal operations.
Legendary Canadian documentarian Alanis Obomsawin digs into the tangled history of Treaty 9 — the infamous 1905 agreement wherein First Nations communities relinquished sovereignty over their traditional territories — to reveal the deceptions and distortions which the document has been subjected to by successive governments seeking to deprive Canada’s First Peoples of their lands.
In 1896, three survivors of a whaling ship-wreck in the Canadian Arctic are saved and adopted by an Eskimo tribe but frictions arise when the three start misbehaving.
Gil Cardinal searches for his natural family and an understanding of the circumstances that led to his becoming a foster child. An important figure in the history of Canadian Indigenous filmmaking, Gil Cardinal was born to a Métis mother but raised by a non-Indigenous foster family, and with this auto-biographical documentary he charts his efforts to find his biological mother and to understand why he was removed from her. Considered a milestone in documentary cinema, it addressed the country’s internal colonialism in a profoundly personal manner, winning a Special Jury Prize at Banff and multiple international awards.
In 1926, a young couple set off into the British Columbia wilderness in search of an undiscovered mountain. A century later a group of would-be adventurers tries to retrace their steps. They soon find they've bitten off more than they can chew and it will take everything they've got to avoid disaster.
Today it is the city of Montreal, but 3 centuries ago the tiny band of missionary founders called it Ville-Marie, the holy city of Mary. This film goes back to its beginning and those who felt called to plant an oasis of Christianity in the North American wilderness. In an imaginative, at times almost surrealistic, way the film recalls the highborn company from France, and shows what survives of Ville-Marie in the Montreal of today.
An expedition to climb British Columbia's highest mountain goes awry in the face of bad weather, a series of comic mishaps and the stubborn insistence of its leader on using antique climbing equipment.