Willard: The Hermit of Gully Lake
★ 6.5 · 2007 · 74m · Documentary
In the 1940's American-born Willard MacDonald jumped his troop train heading to WWII. Fearing authorities he lived as a hermit deep in the northern wilderness of Nova Scotia, Canada for more than 60 years inspiring folklore for generations.
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Return to Guam
1944 · ★ 6
Return to Guam is a 1944 short propaganda film produced by the US Navy about the taking and recapture of the island of Guam. The film starts when a convoy of ships nearing the island sees strange lights flashing from the island in Morse code "information". After cautiously investigating the signal, they find that it was made by a white man, George Tweed, the last survivor of the original garrison at Guam. Tweed relates his harrowing story of how he survived in the bush for 31 months with the help of the natives, Chamorros.
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All This and World War II
1976 · ★ 5.6
Peter Gabriel is among the rockstars performing the music of Lennon and McCartney against a montage of World War II newsreel footage.
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Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives
1992 · ★ 6.8
Ten women in Canada talk about being lesbian in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: discovering the pulp fiction of the day about women in love, their own first affairs, the pain of breaking up, frequenting gay bars, facing police raids, men's responses, and the etiquette of butch and femme roles. Interspersed among the interviews and archival footage are four dramatized chapters from a pulp novel, "Forbidden Love".
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The Blue Hills
2006 · ★ 10
A documentary on the volunteer Estonian Army's defense against the Soviet Army in 1944 with an emphasis on its last stand in the region known as the Blue Hills of Estonia.
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National Geographic Explorer: The Battle For Midway
1999 · ★ 7
National Geographic follows underwater explorer Bob Ballard as he searches for the aircraft carrier sunk during the Battle of Midway.
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2008
To The Tar Sands follows a group of nineteen young environmentalists as they cycle over 1,300 kilometres northbound across Alberta to witness the impacts of Alberta’s tar sands boom firsthand. They talk to farmers, moms and dads, an urban planner, oil industry workers, the chief of a First Nations community and others along the way asking “How has the tar sands boom affected you?” As the kilometres click away, they excavate into their own complicity with Alberta’s rush to develop the tar sands.
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World War Two: 1942 and Hitler's Soft Underbelly
2012 · ★ 7.2
The British fought the Second World War to defeat Hitler. This film asks why, then, did they spend so much of the conflict battling through North Africa and Italy? Historian David Reynolds reassesses Winston Churchill's conviction that the Mediterranean was the 'soft underbelly' of Hitler's Europe. Travelling to Egypt and Italian battlefields like Cassino, scene of some of the worst carnage in western Europe, he shows how, in reality, the 'soft underbelly' became a dark and dangerous obsession for Churchill. Reynolds reveals a prime minister very different from the jaw-jutting bulldog of Britain's 'finest hour' in 1940 - a leader who was politically vulnerable at home, desperate to shore up a crumbling British empire abroad, losing faith in his army and even ready to deceive his American allies if it might delay fighting head to head against the Germans in northern France. The film marks the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein in 1942.
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The Pig Farm
2011 · ★ 5.8
The life and murders of one of the worst serial killers in history, Robert Pickton who went unchallenged for decades.
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The Street Performers
2015 · ★ 3
This documentary-style short follows two impoverished teens performing on the streets of London in the days leading up to the London Blitz of 1940.
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John Ford: The Man Who Invented America
2019 · ★ 5.9
Over a 50-year career and more than a hundred movies, filmmaker John Ford (1894-1973) forged the legend of the Far West. By giving a face to the underprivileged, from humble cowboys to persecuted minorities, he revealed like no one else the great social divisions that existed and still exist in the United States. More than four decades after his death, what remains of his legacy and humanistic values in the memory of those who love his work?
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Pond Hockey
2008
The pond. This is where hockey was born-under the open sky-where the ice is gritty and so is the play. For generations, Northlanders have grown up on outdoor ice. But, there are new climate- controlled arenas in every town, and that's where the kids go to practice year-round now.
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