It's Just Better

February 9, 2021 1:32 PM

It's Just Better. From the National Film Board of Canada website: This short documentary takes us to a farmhouse on Cape Breton Island where Shawn Peter Dwyer, age 10, lives with his mother and nine brothers and sisters. While the children’s pockets are usually empty, their lives are well filled. The film was made in 1982 by Beverly Shaffer. The film is fifteen minutes long, and ends with a scene of them all in a room hanging out together. It's something to behold.
posted by Alex404 (14 comments total)

I can’t think of another short film ran me through such a gamut of feelings. Also weirdly touching to see so many familiar housewares in another setting...the jug for bagged milk, Bond Fast, orange handled scissors.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:04 PM on February 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

Beverly Shaffer has quite a few interesting films - many of which are on YouTube/etc.

This evoked so many memories of Canadian rural/small-time farming life - and that era. The rabbits especially, I remember my first time encountering rabbits on the farm we went to live on, and the family stating: "don't get too attached to them"...
posted by rozcakj at 3:08 PM on February 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

Wow. Gosh I’d love to know how that kid is now. I wonder how this film got made and he became the narrator. We would get NFBC short films on TV in California growing up and they were always good and so different from the regular American broadcast TV. Now I wonder where I saw them. Maybe PBS but I rarely watched that. Early cable?
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 3:43 PM on February 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

This was part of a series called Children of Canada, all of which are just as interesting, and I think most if not all should be there on the NFB site. This set was too recent to have made it into my school when I was a kid - all our NFB samplings being from the '60s and '70s then despite it being the '90s - so it was a real treat to discover them.

I lived in the area for a while, and I was tickled to realize that I'm 99% sure the narrator is the same fellow who made the (local) news several years later when he and his partner had triplets. So I think he went on to have a family on the large size, himself.
posted by northernish at 3:56 PM on February 9, 2021 [6 favorites]

Possibly this guy, northernish?
posted by Mogur at 4:13 PM on February 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

So many good things about this, thank you! I grew up in Nova Scotia as a kid, a place where it’s just cold enough to have ice in the winter but the ice is often slippery: the kid exiting the outhouse with the toilet paper in his hand does exactly the cat-like reflex arm-lifting action upon starting to slip that I still do, 50 years on. Beauty.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 5:34 PM on February 9, 2021 [5 favorites]

so calm and peaceful.
posted by cabin fever at 10:37 PM on February 9, 2021

...orange handled scissors
and how (my mom had them in her sewing kit).
And that one kid had my Habs' hat.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:32 AM on February 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you! I love documentaries like this so much. A small slice that is so rich. It left me wondering about them. Selfishly, I want more, like the 7 Up film series. What a nice film!
posted by zerobyproxy at 7:31 AM on February 10, 2021

If you enjoy this, be sure and watch Sweetgrass – it's more about the sheep than the people, but it's an absolutely entracing documentary.

Honeyland is really incredible too, although it doesn't shy away from the harsher parts of that reality, and can be a bit hard to watch at times.
posted by oulipian at 10:55 AM on February 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

I grew up rural so nothing unusual here for me. But I was so sad hearing him say he hopes there's a cure for alcohol so his dad can come home.
posted by cape at 11:55 AM on February 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Can't wait to show this to my husband, who also grew up in Cape Breton. He would have been 11 in '82. His family had 7 kids. In one set of cousins there were 8.
posted by kitcat at 1:26 PM on February 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

I spent my high school years in nearby St-Peter's, Cape Breton -- just across the Bras D'Or lake from there. I graduated the same year this was filmed, and that summer my family moved to the countryside just north of Montreal, Quebec.

Lots of familiar things and sights; from the firewood burning stove (we were lucky and had both one of those in the kitchen *as well* as an electric stove), to the well behind the house (although ours was connected to a pump). We still had one of those old-style wringer washers back then, and no dryer, so we had to "freeze dry" our clothing on the long clothesline outside during the winter -- it would take several days for it to happen, but they smelled *so* good when they were finally brought in!!

There were definitely some large families in Cape Breton back around then; my cousins who lived nearby on the Chapel Island reserve were a family of 12 kids! A lot of them went on to have large families themselves -- so they make up quite a tribe themselves!!
posted by Jade Dragon at 8:13 PM on February 11, 2021

Another wonderful film about homestead life is Heartland (1979), with Rip Torn. It’s based on the book Letters of a Woman Homesteader, by Eleanor Pruitt Stewart - still a great favorite in the genre.
posted by mmiddle at 1:18 PM on February 12, 2021