NFB Kids: Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of Canada, 1939-1989

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Author-educator Brian Low describes his scrupulously researched treatise
as “a re-creation of a half-century of childhood in the cinematic
mirror.” The opening chapter provides a broad demographic profile of
children in NFB films and lays the groundwork for observing them as a
cinematic society. The second and third chapters encompass a brief
history of the NFB, including the aims of founder John Grierson and how
those aims were realized in various films. Low goes on to discuss
childhood cinematic society from 1947 to 1967 and the broader
implications of the social relations depicted in that society from 1968
to 1989. The well-chosen photographs support the book’s thesis.

NFB Kids is an interdisciplinary milestone. It will be of interest not
just to documentary filmmakers, film instructors, and media
theoreticians, but to sociologists, educators, and historians as well.