Movies: Robert Verrall

A study of life at Christmastime in Moose Factory, an old settlement mainly composed of Cree families on the shore of James Bay, composed entirely of children's crayon drawings and narrated by children....

Robert Ross (Brent Carver) lives a protected adolescence in a well-off Toronto suburb. Secretive and withdrawn, he shares his thoughts only with his sister Rowena (Anne-Marie MacDonald) who is mentally disabled. He feels compassion for his weak and ...

A family of seven lives on a New England island with nobody else. One winter, they got stranded because the bay froze over. This didn't much matter to them, but someone on the mainland remembered them and launched an aerial rescue mission; an unfound...

A collection of one-minute cartoons produced by the National Film Board of Canada animators for government sponsors. Showcasing a playful selection of animation techniques, the clips include reminders about t4levision programs, traffic safety rules, ...

The life and work of the documentary pioneer....

Face of the Earth explores the origin of our planet's outer layer, the why-and-how of its mobility. Through the use of well-designed diagrams, the earth's cyclical activity is clearly explained. Some unusual footage on volcanoes gives added punch to ...

A group of actors in the East Village of New York City have been rehearsing for a play when the lead actress in the play turns up dead....

Three native Canadians find a boy on the side of a highway who had been struck by a speeding driver....

Kathleen Shannon describes the look and feel of her childhood to an artist friend, and uses his paintings and her visit to the ruins of the mining site where she grew up to reflect on her early life and how it influenced the adult she became....

An amusing diagnosis of big-city growing pains, Boomsville is an ironic view of town planning, or rather, the lack of it, and what has happened to our cities as a result. Done in cartoon animation, the film traces the growth of the typical city, from...

Incident at Restigouche is a 1984 documentary film by Alanis Obomsawin, chronicling a series of two raids on the Listuguj Mi'gmaq First Nation (Restigouche) by the Sûreté du Québec in 1981, as part of the efforts of the Quebec government to impose ne...

This tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale by Croatian director Zlatko Grgic traces man's checkered history with fire, and shows how growing carelessness in the form of overloaded sockets, smoldering cigarettes and other fire hazards can have highly undesi...

This feature-length drama explores the changing role of men in today's society by delving into the stories of 4 men and their relationships with women....

An incident from the early days of Québec's quiet revolution, tailor-made for the cartoonist. It is the story of a Montréal commuter train, a unilingual ticket collector and a bilingual passenger. The passenger appears on screen himself to describe h...

This short animation transports us from the farthest conceivable point of the universe to the tiniest particle of existence, an atom of a living human cell. The art of animation and animation camera achieve this exhilarating journey with a freshness ...

A film demonstrating steps to take in the event of a nuclear attack. Animated drawings show the effects of atomic explosions in the air and at ground level. How wide an area is affected by light and heat flash, radiation and radioactive fall-out are ...

A chain-smoking woman has an encounter with a vampire....

This feature documentary by Alanis Obomsawin is a thoughtful tribute to Norman Cornett, a McGill University professor celebrated by scores of students appreciative of his unconventional yet powerful teaching methods who was controversially dismissed ...

The maple leaf on the Canadian flag turns into two profiles that illustrate the many relationships between people....

An early experiment in employing computers to animate film. The result is a dazzling vibration of geometric forms in vivid color, an effect achieved by varying the speed at which alternate colors change, so producing optical illusions. In between the...