Challenge for Change / Société Nouvelle

A group of young girls and married women express their views of marriage and motherhood while glossy advertisements extolling romance, weddings, and babies flash across the screen in contrast to their words. Could the solution to dashed expectations be as simple as growing up before marriage? Part of the Challenge for Change program.

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.

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."

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.