Canada on Screen Digital Catalogue

In 2017, Canada celebrated its 150th birthday. With the whole country experiencing something of a moment on the world stage (Justin Trudeau; Drake; a potentially exaggerated reputation for being nice), TIFF took the opportunity to look back at Canada’s rich heritage of films and moving image works. We selected, in collaboration with a committee of experts, the 150 essential moving-image works from Canada’s cinematic history, and presented them via a beautiful digital catalogue.

With a rich collection of works ranging from the well-known (did the video for “Hotline Bling” make the list? It sure did.) to the awesomely obscure (what do you think “Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper” is about?), the digital catalogue needed to be highly visual and invite exploration and discovery.

The solution was to create a completely immersive microsite that displays artifacts and images from the works alongside commissioned original essays that explain the significance and context of each one. The focus of the whole site is browsing and discovery, with a highly visual homepage inviting users into each vertical, and every work’s page linking out to related works from other verticals.

The result is a digital catalogue that celebrates the history of Canadian cinema on the occasion of our 150th b-day, and that will live on well beyond 2017 to inspire the next generation of creators.

Explore the catalogue.