Films from EXPO67 May 28th/29th Bytowne Cinema

The six panel film "We Are Young"

The Lost Dominion Screening Collective is co-presenting this series with Cinemaexpo67 and in collaboration with La cinémathèque québécoise

A collection of five shorts, all of which were made for pavillions at Expo 67, the centrepiece of Canada's 1967 centenary. To show off the country and/or provinces, these films used cutting edge split-screen technology and multiple projections in purpose-built auditoria. They're plot-free but dense with images – thousands of things to see per minute.

"Polar Life"

Here, the multi-image formats have been digitally remastered to be playable on a standard screen, but there's still a jaw-dropping amount of footage on display. The Ontario film, "A Place To Stand" won an Oscar. This is a unique opportunity to see these groundbreaking specialty films.

A frame from "A Place to Stand"

The shorts, not necessarily in this order, will be:

Polar Life (20 min.)
Canada Is My Piano (7 min.)
A Place To Stand (17 min.)
We Are Young (20 min.)
Plus a surprise bonus short. 
For more details on the films please go to cinemaexpo67

"Canada is My Piano"

The program runs about 85mins.

The films screen at the Bytowne Cinema in Ottawa on May 28th at 2pm and May 29th at 8:50pm
The screenings are free and open to all.

Newsreel Shorts by Associated Screen Studios, April 2nd and 3rd Bytowne Cinema

Associated Screen Studios was a major producer of informative shorts that played in cinemas of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, before television took over the news business. We have unearthed 8 fascinating examples for this compilation, including a 1933 film on Grey Owl, shorts on canines in the police force and on the sport of curling in the 1950s, a 1932 retrospective on events of the previous 10 years, and even a 1950s report on what jobs hockey players had to hold down during the off-season. All on 35mm film!

Newsreels include:

Grey Owl's Strange Guests, 1933

Headline News 1950

The Roaring Game (about curling), 1951

Canine Crime Busters (about police dogs), 1952

There too, Go I (about the Red Cross during the Second World War), 1941

Sitzmarks the Spot (about downhill skiing), 1948

Back in '22 (looking back 10 years at what happening in 1922), 1932

Hockey Star Summers (what hockey stars do during the summer to supplement their incomes), 1950

The Man Who Skied Down Everest, March 12-13th on 35MM film.

The Man Who Skied Down Everest, March 12th 1pm and March 13th 9:15pm, Bytowne Cinema.

The Man Who Skied Down Everest, produced by Ottawa's own Crawley Films, is a monumental movie in more ways than one. Founded by Budge Crawley in the late 1940's, Crawley Films grew into Canada's largest independent film studio, and even rivaled the NFB for cinematic output. It produced everything from Canada's second animated feature film (Return to Oz) in 1962, to industrial films, tv commercials, feature films and documentaries. Based in Ottawa/Gatineau, with a studio in Old Chelsea and a branch office in Toronto, it produced over 5000 films and won numerous awards over its 43 year history, including the Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary in 1976 for The Man Who Skied Down Everest (the first Academy Award ever won by a Canadian feature film).  This film follows Japanese adventurer Yuichiro Miura as he attempts to ski down the tallest mountain in the world. Very popular with both audiences and critics of the time,  this is a film that deserves being seen on the big screen.

A beautiful 35mm reprint from 2010 will be screened courtesy of Library and Archives Canada