Noreen Golfman

Once upon a time the paradigm of Canadian film history located the documentary as the foundational genre, and the rural, whether dense wilderness or vast, largely unpeopled landscape, as the foundational subject. Funded at first by the Canadian Pacific Railway at the turn of the last century and then by the National Film Board just before and then during the Second World…

Something outrageous is going on here. Perse Joyce, the narrator of Wayne Johnston’s powerful new novel, The Son of a Certain Woman, is literally a marked boy—stained purple by birth, with a swollen lower lip, and outsized hands and feet that not only brand him a freak of the town but also make him vulnerable to the taunts of young bullies and the disdain of their…

Two young guys with thick hair, dressed like extras in Rebel without a Cause, are roaring down the open road in a 1960 Chevy Impala convertible. Eager to see their Maritime home recede in their rear-view mirror, and with only $26 in their pockets, they are heading directly for the Toronto of…

My library of Canadian film books is not much larger now than it was when I first started studying the subject more decades ago than I care to remember. At least in English Canada, the list of major works about Canadian filmmakers has been fairly modest. Shorter articles on the subject are more abundant, of course, and anyone working in a post-secondary film studies program would be able to track down a respectable number of essays about individual…

It was late May 1997 and Memorial University was hosting the annual Learneds congress for the humanities and social sciences. Over the course of a week, about 5,000 academics had gathered to listen to papers, reconnect with mentors and old friends and take in the sights. Typical of the time of year, massive icebergs floated down the Labrador seas in time to impress the…