Video of the Week: The Back-Breaking Leaf – Films from Canada

This week we have something for our Canadian readers (and others too, of course), taken from the National Film Board of Canada.

The NFB has a website where many videos and documentaries - from decades ago up to today - are free to view. You can access it here and view videos at your leisure.

There are many excellent videos on the site, but for this selection we picked a documentary from 1959 about tobacco farmers in Ontario. It was only a generation ago, and within living memory for many of us, but already this film shows how different things were back then. It's an insight into the world of migrant workers who created a multicultural community for themselves during the tobacco harvest.