About the Film
Winter Crossing at L’Isle-aux-Coudres, a 1960 film from the National Film Board of Canada (NFBC), follows villagers from a small Quebec island as they make the hazardous winter journey across the frozen St. Lawrence River. Reading the changing colors and textures of the ice, they drag their long wooden canoes over solid stretches, paddle through open channels, and struggle across shifting fields of broken ice to reach the mainland.
Directed by René Bonnière and Pierre Perrault, the documentary records the skill, courage, and intimate knowledge of the river that once made this essential crossing possible.
