Donald Douglas

Movies

Vodka: A Russian Fairytale
Narrator
Canada Vignettes: Dancing Dolls
Music
An animated vignette. A lively dance of painted wooden dolls that twirl, swing and sway to gay music.
Christ Is Risen
Music
Easter service takes place in the Russian Orthodox church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Montréal. The depth of emotion touched by this ancient ceremony is reflected in the film. Filmed in the shadowy, taper-lit space, sonorous with chanting voices, and coloured with occasional views of the icons and frescos, the film shows an absorbing religious experience.
In Search of the Bowhead Whale
Music Editor
This adventure film features Scott McVay, an authority on whales, and filmmaker Bill Mason. The objective was to film the bowhead, a magnificent inhabitant of the cold Arctic seas brought to the edge of extinction by overfishing. With helicopter and Inuit guide, aqualungs and underwater cameras, the expedition searches out and meets the bowhead and beluga.
Ordinary Tenderness
Music
A lonely woman spends the winter isolated and reminiscing about the past as she waits for her husband to return from a prolonged absence.
The Sunny Munchy Crunchy Natural Food Shop
Music
This short documentary takes you on a tour of one of Montreal's first health food stores. The camera scans shelves stocked with all manner of natural foods to which nary an additive has been added: soybean and sesame seed products, wild honey, and even eggs from hens fed on blackstrap molasses. But the real eye-openers are in what you hear between the aisles, from the store's owner and his customers.
Temples of Time
Editor
Filmed in the Canadian Rockies and in Garibaldi Park, this documentary features magnificent footage of mountain solitudes and the wildlife found there, of natural splendour in all its changing moods. The film carries the implicit warning that all this may pass away if people do not seek to preserve it. Without words.
Matrioska
Music
A dance of painted wooden Russian dolls (hollow inside and of graded sizes so that the largest holds all the rest). They twirl, swing and sway to gay Russian tunes, never losing their fixed reserve. As the dance ends they hop up in turn into the mother figure, who then hurries off the scene.
Don't Knock the Ox
Music
The International Ox Pull, highlight of the Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, annual fair, is a holdover from the pioneer past when oxen cleared the land and tilled the soil. These beasts of burden have lost none of their pulling power, as demonstrated when they drag tons of weight loaded on sleds (the winner pulls up to 6 tons!). Competing teams come from various parts of the Maritimes and the Northeastern United States.
Oddball
Music
A child founds a strange ball.
The Game
Music
It’s the typical boy-meets-girl game, but played without rules and at a time when the boy must prove himself. Touching on the subject of teenage sexuality, the film shows that the game often starts with a challenge to the boy’s masculine ego from his peers.
Little White Crimes
Sound Editor
A tale from downtown, where the morality of business is not always as transparent as the shining glass fronts of the office buildings. The film follows the adventures of a young man on the way up, intent on building an image to match his ambitions. In doing so he leaves a trail of hurt feelings among those he uses as steps toward his goal.
Le campeur décampe
Music
This short film tells the amusing tale of a man who feels the common urge to escape the city's noise for the weekend. Made without words, but with a wide range of other sounds, this film tracks our hero to a perfect haven of pandemonium. The countryside, it turns out, is not as unspoiled and quiet as the poets proclaim.
What on Earth!
Music
The Martians speculate on the nature of Earth's apparent dominant life form, automobiles.
60 Cycles
Music
On your marks. Follow cyclists from 13 countries as they cover 2.400 km of Gaspé countryside in 12 days-a course longer than those of Italy, Belgium or Spain. The long shots of curving landscape and open road are set to a mesmerizing soundtrack in this documentary, and the results are spellbinding.
War II: Total War
Music
A film record, suitable for schools, of the war years of 1939 to 1945, showing major developments from the rise of Nazism in Germany to the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima. It does not minimize the brutality of war, but shows how this "total war," unlike wars of the past that engaged only the men of the fighting front, involved in varying degree almost every individual of every nation.
Les ludions
Music
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen
Original Music Composer
A 1964 documentary portrait of Cohen in his pre-musician days as a poet and stand-up comedian.
Runner
Music
Young long-distance runner Bruce Kidd practices and competes.
The Days of Whisky Gap
Music
Rousing tales of the North-West Mounted Police are brought to life through photos and artists' sketches. In 1873, the North-West Mounted Police were established to maintain law and order in the North-West Territories. They undertook a trek from Fort Dufferin, south of Winnipeg, to Fort Whoop-up, near present-day Lethbridge, Alberta. The force raised the flag and proclaimed the Queen's Law, ensuring that the Canadian West would not become a lawless, American-style frontier.