A National Film Board of Canada production

The greatest Canadian politician in the history of the universe.

Haunted by visions of the future. Vilified by the political establishment. Charming beyond belief. Behold the dazzling ascent of Brian Mulroney, the “Boy from Baie-Comeau” who built a brand-new Canada. 

Short Synopsis

In 1976, Brian Mulroney launched a charm offensive the likes of which Canada had never seen, dismantling the political establishment one dad joke at a time. In this psychedelic doomscroll through the mind of a master politician, filmmaker Matthew Rankin charts the flamboyant rise of Canada’s 18th prime minister. From the backwoods of Baie-Comeau to the backrooms of power, Mulroney plots his ascent, trouncing his enemies with a smile and preparing Canada for the unlimited prosperity and permanent unity we live in today.  

Long Synopsis

Once upon a time, there was a boy from Baie-Comeau.  

That boy would become a man of the people and a furnace of political ambition, destined for the bright lights of our nation’s capital.  

Haunted by the ghost of John Diefenbaker and the disembodied voice of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, he sets out to accomplish the Progressive Conservative dream: winning over Quebec, uniting a fragmented country and creating fiscally responsible prosperity for all. 

In a genre-bending collage of VHS-ravaged Canadiana, filmmaker Matthew Rankin remixes and reimagines 80,000 pieces of archive, chronicling our 18th prime minister’s crash course with destiny as he clobbers Joe Clark and ushers in a new kind of conservatism for the 1980s. What emerges is a fever dream of politics, propaganda and pop culture as hypnotic as its subject.  

Behold the unstoppable ascent of a generational political genius who charmed a nation into oblivion.  

Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Mulroney. 

First of all, I want to say that I think Brian Mulroney is completely amazing. This film is not the hagiography of blessed St-Brian-de-Baie-Comeau, but neither is it an ideological curb-stomping of the man. You can blame it on my Winnipeg upbringing perhaps, but I relate to the world through irony, and a skeptic has little to offer true believers. I am drawn to Mulroney because he was the prime minister when I was a kid and because of what he means as a cinematic phenomenon: I first understood him, as maybe most people did, as a character on television.   

From the many thousands of hours of Mulroney-related news footage and propaganda I have sorted through emerges the full televisual force of an astoundingly charismatic and almost vengefully ambitious man, capable of being duplicitous and even ruthless (but hey, that’s politics), uniquely able to dance so effortlessly between Canada’s notoriously parochial two solitudes and, above all, an astonishing, brilliant political genius.  

Don’t misread me: though I genuinely like this man, I still would not vote for him. I am not a person of conservative persuasion, but I also dislike ideologically driven films of any sort that try to tell you how to think. Nonetheless, we are confronted today by a serious reckoning with conservatism, increasingly in its most extreme form. From the vantage point of 2026, the now-forgotten generation of Progressive Conservatives—from John Diefenbaker to Robert Stanfield to Joe Clark—almost appear to be from another planet when we watch them brazenly voicing their support for public institutions, social justice and protecting the environment. It was a world far removed from the infinitely more zealous and combative every-man-for-himself pathology of conservatism today. But in many ways, the political coalition Brian Mulroney earnestly and expertly rallied in 1984 represents a critical turning point in the evolution and meaning of conservatism in Canada.   

A final word, on cinematic language. Revamping the long-abandoned NFB tradition of political documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney uses the tools of genre, satire and experimental abstraction to build a historical argument. My earliest films were found-footage experiments with weird Winnipeg TV commercials, and all of my films involve some element of collage, both in form and content. The viewer may be left with a feeling of doubt about what they are seeing, and I have done everything in my power to encourage that. Even when humourless academic historians do it, synthesizing the raw chronology of the past into a meaningful order with a beginning, a middle and an end is, by its nature, an artistic operation. So I like to be upfront about that: I am an artist, not a chartered accountant, and being brazen instead of covert about cinematic artifice is my way of getting at the truth. A mischief is on the table.   

Inspirations: Mordecai Richler, Arthur Lipsett, Soda Jerk, Donald Brittain, Pierre Falardeau, Jacques Godbout, Pierre Berton, Craig Baldwin, Negativland, Racer Trash, Parks Canada, Evelyn Lambart, Roman Kroitor, Liberace, John Ford, Gottschalk + Ash.