A 1957 Chevy Bel Air performs an ironic take on the American ballad “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).” The radiator grille morphs into a cajoling pair of lips, crooning the reassuring rhymes, while a spectacularly choreographed choir of cars sings backup. A scathing satire of the power of Big Oil, Carface is musical comedy on a grand scale, with filmmaker and cartoonist Claude Cloutier skewering carefree contemporary attitudes toward the threats to our planet.
In Quiet Zone, the filmmakers take us deep into the world of those who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity. These “wave refugees” settled in West Virginia around the Green Bank observatory, in an area known as the National Radio Quiet Zone. Combining elements of documentary, film essay and experimental film, Quiet Zone defies genres, weaving together an unusual story in which sound and image distort reality to make the distress and suffering of these people palpable.
Directed by two-time Oscar®-nominated animator and long-time NFB collaborator Cordell Barker (The Cat Came Back, Strange Invaders), If I Was God explores the difficult gateway between childhood and adolescence, when the approaching power of adulthood is often mistaken for omnipotence. Drawing inspiration from his own memories of a particularly awkward day in Grade 7, and using a variety of animation techniques, from traditional animation to stop-motion puppets and more, Barker creates a darkly whimsical 3D animated short film with an organic, hand-made feel that’s as imperfectly human as the world we all ultimately craft for ourselves.
Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise is an interactive documentary that takes us into the apartments, hearts, minds and computers of vertical citizens around the world to reveal the digital human condition in the 21st century. Trapped in our highrise units, can we find love, hate, peace, god, community—or a better world—online?
Six recipes. Six different women. Recounting lifetimes of hardship and joy, the women profiled in this interactive documentary share the beloved bread recipes of their families, communities, and heritages, reflecting the spiritual and cultural nourishment that only fresh, hand-made food can provide. From the Dutch pannekoek recipe of a WWII refugee to the traditional fry bread of a Blackfoot woman, each recipe reflects the diverse experiences of the woman behind it. By sharing recipes from their families and cultures, the women in Bread are giving voice to the universal human experiences—pain, joy, memory, and love—that make us who we are.
Do Not Track is a personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy. If you share data with us, we’ll show you what the web knows about you.
Haiku is a highly formalized Japanese form of short poem. It describes phenomena within the space of a single breath, using our senses and our emotions. The instantaneous nature of haiku invites both reflection and imagination.
On the Internet, everything is fast. Very very very fast. We consume more and more shorter and shorter content. Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, the most-shared BuzzFeed lists – everything is designed to be rapidly ingested. But just because something is short doesn't mean it can't have depth. After all, there are plenty of powerful short films, web clips rich in content, poems filled with intensity, and haikus pregnant with meaning...
The National Film Board of Canada and ARTE hit on the idea of adapting the haiku formula to the digital age. Together, they sought submissions from creators who were up to the challenge of producing interactive explorations that met the following 10 criteria:
The experience should be 60 seconds long.
It should inspire us to see the world we live in differently.
One interactive concept should be used.
It should employ a full browser design with common NFB/ARTE header.
No navigation menu should be used.
It must include sound.
It should be understandable and accessible to an international audience.
Project creators must own or have released all rights.
It must be computer and tablet friendly.
It must break one of the creative rules.
Out of the 162 proposals received from around the world, 12 were selected. In addition to being short, the digital haikus they have created are surprising, moving and smart. Together, they form a collection of 12 interactive explorations.
The winning 12 interactive haiku proposals were chosen by an international jury made up of IDFA DocLab founder and curator Caspar Sonnen; OFFF Festival founder and programmer Héctor Ayuso; David Carzon, assistant editor at Libération; artist and computer engineer Jonathan Harris; NFB Interactive Studio head of production Marie-Pier Gauthier; ARTE web commissioning editor Alexander Knetig; and jury chair William Uricchio, professor of comparative media studies and principal investigator at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Game Lab.
The Deeper They Bury Me offsets this dark history with surprising tenderness and lyricism, returning throughout to a simple voice on the phone. Speaking down the line, across decades of deprivation and injustice, it resounds with defiance, humour and wisdom.
Way to Go is a walk in the woods. It is an astonishing interactive experience, a restless panorama, a mixture of hand-made animation, 360˚ video capture, music and dreaming and code; but mostly it is a walk in the woods, c'mon. Created by Vincent Morisset, Philippe Lambert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit & Caroline Robert (AATOAA). Produced by the NFB & France TV.
How much time do we spend without looking at our emails on our phones? What do we do when we are not productive? Can we share a meal with family or friends without checking our messages? Are we able to stop looking at our phones at any given moment? These questions are at the heart of a very modern phenomenon: the inability to do nothing, the avoidance of idleness. The way the topic is handled is paradoxical: we use an application to think about how to respond to slowness and non-productivity, that is, how to praise wasting time... on a device that typically devours all of it. This playful, interactive tale, a true invitation to idleness, was incubated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in collaboration with the Open Documentary Lab, and is intended as a hybridisation of genres, on the fringes of game, application and animation.
Primal is a collaborative experience on the expression of our most intense feelings, through the creation of an eternal scream. A 9000 km long collaboration between the Canal Encuentro (Argentina) and the National Film Board of Canada.
Pride, wrath, lust, greed, gluttony, envy, sloth... We have all sinned. And today's digital world brings a whole new set of moral dilemmas. Whether we realize it or not, we all sin online. But does that make us digital sinners?
Seven Digital Deadly Sins invites us to take a look at who we are as moral creatures in the 21st century.
A digital interactive experience created in partnership between the National Film Board of Canada and The Guardian, Seven Digital Deadly Sins explores our modern-age sense of right and wrong through a thought-provoking mix of in-depth articles, short films, and anonymous confessions to a wide range of online behaviours.
Most surprising, perhaps, is that the Seven Digital Deadly Sins website puts us in the judgment seat, inviting us to condemn or absolve—anonymously—behaviours that have become ingrained in our online interactions. As the site's compiled user-generated answers paint a clearer picture of our collective consciousness, they also reveal the growing disconnect between the double lives we lead—online and in the real world. Technology be praised or damm