Fanny Lauzier

A look at the importance of midwives in early Canada.

The adventures of Elvira, a 12-year-old girl obsessed with the sea who develops the ability to breathe underwater. Elvira and her dolphin friend Elvar meet a friendly whale, among other creatures, while back on land all is not as it should be.

Fanny lives in the forest with her meteorologist mother. One day on her way across the forest to visit her grandmother and great grandmother, she has three encounters that will change her life forever: an apparently kind and gentle wolf, a city boy and an ornithologist who bears a striking resemblance to the father who long ago abandoned her and her mother.

At a Montreal railway station, passengers are stranded because of a snowstorm. One of the stranded, Pierre-Paul, discovers a young schoolgirl on the brink of suicide. While he searches for someone to intervene, Chili, the young girl, disappears, only to reappear of her own accord after Pierre-Paul's fruitless search. This brief encounter leads to flashback revelations and interaction among the supporting characters also stranded in the storm.

In 1950, in a small village called Northern Station, Samuel, a young mailman and his girlfriend, Évelyne, spend hours replying to letters that children have sent to Santa Claus. While delivering the letters on Christmas Eve, Samuel dies of cold in the forest. He finds himself in the magic land of Santa Claus, where he becomes an elf in charge of answering Santa’s mail. Fifty years later, Samuel opens a letter from Satia, a young girl from Northern Station who asks Santa Claus if he will save her grandmother, who is seriously ill. With the help of his friend, Howie, the young elf decides to go to the village for grant the child’s wish. However, it turns out that Satia’s grandmother is none other than Évelyne.

Between her four children, her husband, her job at the hardware store, and the creditors on her back, Hélène leads a life that dangerously resembles a makeshift camp in a constant state of emergency. She muddles through as best she can.

A nostalgic deep dive into the world of Rock Demers’ popular children’s film series.

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No overview available.

Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and are now also sold on DVD. The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy. The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, Canada Post Power Broadcasting, and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute. While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.