Challenge for Change / Société Nouvelle

Released in 1968 and often referred to as Canada’s first music video, The Ballad of Crowfoot was directed by Willie Dunn, a Mi’kmaq/Scottish folk singer and activist who was part of the historic Indian Film Crew, the first all-Indigenous production unit at the NFB. The film is a powerful look at colonial betrayals, told through a striking montage of archival images and a ballad composed by Dunn himself about the legendary 19th-century Siksika (Blackfoot) chief who negotiated Treaty 7 on behalf of the Blackfoot Confederacy. The IFC’s inaugural release, Crowfoot was the first Indigenous-directed film to be made at the NFB.

A critical look at marriage and motherhood through the views of a group of young girls and boys and a group of married women, contrasted with glossy advertisements extolling romance, weddings and babies. The film ends with the thought that the solution could be growing up before marriage.

Joy is a research biologist, a consultant to a large company. She is also a widow with two school-age children. In discussing her own dilemmas she speaks for many other women. "The powers that be know that women do work, but they turn a deaf ear." Apart from "discrimination against women," Joy sees the absence of universal day care as a loss for children too.

This short documentary profiles a community engaged in developing sustainable living methods, including food production and small-scale solar and wind technology, on a farm in Massachusetts in the 1970s. Well before sustainability was a mainstream concern, these prescient innovators attempted to create a vision of a greener, kinder world. "Think small," say the New Alchemists. "Look what thinking big has done."