That’s “Canadian Content” for those of you in my audience unfamiliar with the term.
I don’t remember how I stumbled across this, but yesterday I discovered “The Devil at Your Heels”, a 1981 documentary by Robert Fortier which is available at the National Film Board of Canada’s website.
Perhaps surprisingly to some people, this is not a movie about blues music. “Devil” is a documentary about Ken Carter, a semi-famous Canadian stunt driver, and his attempt to jump a car from the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River to the US side: a distance of about one mile.
According to the background blog entry on the film, Fortier originally intended this to be a short documenting the jump.
It took five years just to get to the point where Carter was actually able and ready to make the attempt. And Fortier kept filming in spite of the setbacks: rain interfering with construction of the jump ramp, exploding rocket fuel tanks, Carter’s attempts to raise money…
I “watched” about 55 minutes of it yesterday while puttering around doing other things, and plan to finish watching it in the next couple of days. There is a twist at the end which I spoiled for myself, but I won’t do that to you. (If you search for “Ken Carter” or “The Devil at Your Heels” on Wikipedia, you’ll find the twist.) From what I saw, I think this is another Canadian documentary that’s worth your attention. It isn’t quite as bat guano insane as “Project Grizzly“, but it’s still fun.
The whole movie is also available in high-def on YouTube, again thanks to the NFB:
Somehow, while searching around looking for more stuff about Ken Carter and the jump, I ran across this article on AutoFocus, a Canadian auto news site, about Jacques Ostiguy. Ostiguy was a Canadian designer, noted for his work on the Chrysler Cordoba and for Bombardier (the company that made Ski-Doo snowmobiles).
I wanted to note this because I love this quote in the article:
(Content warning: article may not be 100% safe for work in some environments. There are no explicit drawings in the article itself, but some people might take offense at the headline.)