Harman Patil (Editor)

Heritage Minutes

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First episode date
  
1991

7.5/10
IMDb

Genre
  
Documentary film

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Nominations
  
Gemini Award for Best Photography in a Dramatic Program or Series

Similar
  
The Greatest Canadian, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Canada: A People's History, Rick Mercer Report, The Blue Planet

Heritage minutes a part of canadian history since the beaverton


Heritage Minutes, formerly known as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, is a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. The Minutes integrate Canadian history, folklore and myths into dramatic storylines. Like the Canada Vignettes of the 1970s, the Minutes themselves have become a part of Canadian culture and been the subject of academic studies as well as parody.

Contents

The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991, as part of a one-off history quiz show hosted by Wayne Rostad. Originally distributed to schools, they appeared frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and were later available online and on DVD. "Radio minutes" have also been made.

Heritage minutes viola desmond


Background

The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation (subsequently The Historica Dominion Institute), Canada Post (with Bell Canada being a later sponsor) Power Broadcasting (the broadcasting arm of the Power Corporation of Canada), and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated (as well as scripted) by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully.

In 2009 "The Historica Foundation of Canada" merged with "The Dominion Institute" to become "The Historica-Dominion Institute" a national charitable organization. In September 2013, the organization changed its name to "Historica Canada". While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, in the early years they have paid to have them run in cinema theaters across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each vignette counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.

In 2012, two new "Heritage Minutes" were created on the War of 1812, in anticipation of the war's bicentenary. Then in 2014 two Minutes were released on Sir John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier, that had been filmed in and around Toronto in September 2013. To honour the centenary of the start of the First World War two "Minutes" were released; one on the Winnipeg Falcons in 2014 and one on Canadian Nursing Sisters in early 2015. In September 2015, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of Terry Fox's run to conquer cancer, Historica released a "Minute" on Fox's inspirational run. February 2016 saw the release of a "Minute" on Viola Desmond, a trailblazing black female entrepreneur from Halifax who spoke out against racial discrimination in Nova Scotia. On the 21st of June, 2016, the 20th anniversary of National Aboriginal Day, Historica Canada released two new "Minutes." The first tells the story of Chanie "Charlie" Wenjack, whose death sparked the first inquest into the treatment of Indigenous children in Canadian residential schools. The second, Naskumituwin, highlights the making of Treaty 9 from the perspective of historical witness George Spence, an 18-year-old Cree hunter from Albany, James Bay. There are plans to come out with two every year until Canada's 150th birthday in 2017. A 2012 Ipsos Reid poll of 3,900 Canadians selected the five most popular Minutes. Tied for first place was the episodes on Jackie Robinson and Halifax Explosion, followed by Jennie Kidd Trout, Winnie-the-Pooh and Laura Secord. On October 19, 2016, Historica Canada released another Heritage Minute that shows a story about an Inuit artist named Kenojuak Ashevak. It is also the first Heritage minute that is narrated on not just its official languages (English and French) but also a third language, where this Heritage Minute is narrated in Inuktitut.

List of Heritage Minutes

Not all of the Heritage Minutes episodes have actually aired. 85 of them are available for viewing online (as listed below); however, an episode on Canadian Peacekeepers in Cyprus is not available online through Historica Canada.

Parodies

  • The Canadian sketch comedy shows This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Rick Mercer Report, Royal Canadian Air Farce, and Rock et Belles Oreilles, have parodied the Heritage Minute format in sketches, or used the format for satire.
  • The Comedy Network has aired short parodies titled "Sacrilege Moments".
  • Canadian rapper Classified parodied the Heritage Minute in his music video for the song "O Canada..."
  • Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton adapted the Heritage Minute format in a comic about Margaret Trudeau, wife of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
  • In 2007, the Internet comedy group LoadingReadyRun celebrated Canada Day by telling the story of the Heritage Minutes in the format of a Heritage Minute.
  • References

    Heritage Minutes Wikipedia