March Highlights on Nfb.ca: Premieres, Oscars, Studio D Anniversary

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is ushering in spring with great free programming on nfb.ca through the month of March.

The NFB website offers 9 online premieres this month, with powerful new documentaries, dazzling auteur animated shorts and a mind-expanding mobile game.

With Nisha Pahuja's To Kill a Tiger nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature Film, nfb.ca will take a special look at the NFB at the Oscars.

As the NFB prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of the creation of Studio D, its pioneering women's studio, dozens of films from the archives are now available online for the very first time.

Featured online channels at nfb.ca will also pay tribute to International Women's Day, International Francophonie Day and more.

• Starting March 1 | Online premiere | Work Different
  • How has working remotely reshaped the workplace-and our lives? That's the timely question posed by Vancouver filmmaker Julien Capraroin his documentary Work Different. Interviews include Jack Nilles, former NASA Engineer and inventor of the concept of teleworking.

• Starting March 1 | NFB at the Oscars
  • Toronto-based filmmaker Nisha Pahuja's Notice Pictures/NFB co-production To Kill a Tiger marks the 78th Academy Award nomination for an NFB production or co-production-the most for any film organization outside Hollywood. This acclaimed feature doc is one of 71 films featured online, in an amazing collection of Oscar-winning and nominated animation, documentary and short drama.

• Starting March 1 | Celebrating Studio D
  • A Curator's Perspective by Camilo Martin-Florez pays tribute to the 50th anniversary of the founding of Studio D, the NFB's pioneering women's studio. Studio D released more than 200 films over two decades, including three Oscar winners: Beverly Shaffer's I'll Find a Way, Terre Nash's If You Love This Planet and Cynthia Scott's Flamenco at 5:15.
  • The nfb.ca channel Studio D: The Women's Film Studio has been upgraded with 59 additional titles-including dozens of works previously unavailable online-to feature 95 classic films.

• Starting March 4 | Online premieres | Three new animated shorts
  • Winner of nine awards to date, Gatineau-born and Montreal-based animator Janice Nadeau's HARVEY (NFB/Folimage) is a poetic, luminous look at bereavement and coping with the loss of a parent, told through the eyes of a child.
  • Inspired by the classic Carl Sandburg poem, Michelle and Uri Kranot's The Hangman at Home (Late Love Production/Miyu Productions/Floréal Films/NFB) invites viewers into five interwoven stories of people caught in a pivotal moment.
  • In BC filmmaker Bahram Javahery's Two Apples, a young woman takes a single memento from her past when she leaves her homeland: a ripe apple studded with fragrant cloves infused with love, longing and the tender perfume of hope.

• Starting March 11 | Online premieres | Labrador Doc Project
  • In Hebron Relocation, Nunatsiavut filmmaker Holly Andersen explores what makes a place a home as she learns more about her community's connection to generations of displaced northern Labrador Inuit.
  • Part oral history and part visual poem, Inuk artist Heather Campbell's Miss Campbell: Inuk Teacher is the story of Evelyn Campbell, a trailblazer for an Inuit-led educational system in the small community of Rigolet, Labrador.
  • Both films were produced through the Labrador Doc Project, an NFB initiative to amplify the work of first-time Labrador Inuit filmmakers.

• Launching March 18 | Mobile game | NeuroFlowers
  • Created through the NFB's digital internship program Jeunes Pousses, and produced in collaboration with Akufen, NeuroFlowers is a mobile game that plants the idea that like a garden, our minds must flourish. By playing a series of short games featuring colourful flowers and winged creatures, you can sow the seeds of change and reap the rewards of your efforts, all within a rich universe of sound featuring the vocals of Klô Pelgag.

• Starting March 25 | Online premieres | Animation and a new feature doc
  • The latest work by Oscar-nominated Montreal animator Janet Perlman, The Girl with the Red Beret follows a young girl on a wild musical journey on Montreal's Metro, to the tune of Kate and Anna McGarrigle's timeless "Complainte pour Ste-Catherine."
  • In A Quiet Girl, Montreal director Adrian Wills discovers startling truths about his complex beginnings in Newfoundland as an adopted child, in a moving film that honours his birth mother and gives a quiet girl her voice.

• More NFB channels featured in March

  nfb.ca is offering up more great programming throughout the month:

  • Women's Rights and Emancipation: In time for International Women's Day, March 8, this selection of 26 films challenges cultural taboos surrounding women's rights, their sexuality and their fight for bodily autonomy. Films include Courtney Montour's award-winning Mary Two-Axe Earley: I Am Indian Again, about an activist who fought for more than two decades to challenge sex discrimination against First Nations women; and Christy Garland's NFB-co-produced What Walaa Wants, a portrait of a determined young Palestinian woman from a West Bank refugee camp.
  • Francophones Across Canada: The NFB is marking International Francophonie Day, March 20, with a selection of 60 films celebrating the Francophonie across Canada and around the world. Titles include Kenbe la, Until We Win, Will Prosper's moving portrait of Haitian-Quebec artist and activist Alain Philoctète; and Herménégilde Chiasson's classic Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey.
  • Spring Break: This channel features 60 fun and entertaining films for kids, including such classic animated fables as Evelyn Lambart's Frog Went A-Courting, Gayle Thomas's The Magic Flute and Jamie Mason's The Magic of Anansi.
  • Perspectives from Persia and Central Asia: Bahram Javahery's Two Apples joins 11 other films made in or about Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq in a brand-new channel that offers modern perspectives on an ancient world. Acclaimed documentaries include Ariel Nasr's Canadian Screen Award-winning The Boxing Girls of Kabul.