About our collection

An impressive archive of Canadian perspectives 

The National Film Board (NFB) is Canada’s award-winning public producer and distributor of documentaries, animation, interactive stories and participatory experiences. The NFB is also one of the few public agencies in the world that manages its own audiovisual collection. The descendant of two government film departments (the Exhibits and Publicity Bureau, 1918–1923, and the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, 1923–1941), the NFB was created in 1939 and has been instrumental in developing and modernizing Canada’s national cinema. The NFB’s collection now comprises more than 13,000 titles. This impressive archive consists of newsreels, Second World War propaganda films, films commissioned by other federal departments, and socially engaged documentaries made by or about members of a diverse range of communities and groups across the country—anglophones, francophones, Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, Black and racialized Canadians, and 2SLGBTQI+ people, as well as individuals from European, Latin American, African, Asian and Middle Eastern communities, among many others. The collection includes experimental films, web documentaries, interactive experiences and auteur animation, created using an endless variety of animation techniques (some developed entirely or partly at the NFB), in addition to short, mid-length and feature-length fiction films made for television or theatrical release. These works tell the stories of people and communities in every region of the country and around the world, from authentically Canadian perspectives. The films in this collection have been winning national and international awards since the NFB’s inception, for a total of more than 7,000 honours, including 1 Golden Bear (Berlin), 1 Golden Lion (Venice), 4 Cristals (Annecy), 4 Palmes d’Or (Cannes), 4 Webbys (New York), 4 Iris Awards (Montreal), 12 Oscars® (Los Angeles) and 100 Genies (Toronto).