A New Future Lies North (Sally MacDonald, 1956) is a Crawley Films production sponsored by an American investment firm to highlight the economic advantages of Canada. With attention to the decisions made during the film’s production, this essay shows how the film eventually sold an idea of Canada’s future to Canadian audiences as well as to international ones. In this way, the essay asserts that one type of sponsored film produces a cinema of competency, one that is affirming for a range of institutional agendas, which in this case is a national conception of the modernizing potential of resource extraction.
Charles R. Acland (Sat,) studied this question.