NFB

Director: Robert Lower

This feature film examines its own genre, the documentary, which has often been called Canada’s national art form. Released in the year of the NFB’s 75th birthday, Shameless Propaganda is filmmaker Robert Lower’s take on the boldest and most compelling propaganda effort in our history (1939-1945) in which founding NFB Commissioner John Grierson saw the documentary as a “hammer to shape society”.  The films produced until 1945 by the NFB are distilled here for the essence of their message to Canadians. Using only these films and still photos from that era, Lower recreates the picture of Canada they gave us and looks for the Canada we know today. What he finds is by turns enlightening, entertaining and unexpectedly disturbing.