Super 8 film and archival material transferred to HD video

In 1967 the small Albertan town St. Paul was baptised “The Centennial Star” by the Centennial Committee for the quantity, quality, and originality of its year-long celebratory activities. For the marking of the 100 year anniversary of the Confederation, this small community built the world’s first UFO Landing Pad. It was intended to symbolically welcome everybody and even inter-galactic beings to Canada, thereby promoting an image of hospitality, tolerance, diversity, and unity. I see the UFO landing pad as a complex and inherently contradictory architectural instantiation of both nationalist and anti-nationalist discourse. My main focus revolves around the intersection of the discourses of St. Paul’s monument and the radical shift in Canadian immigration policy that occurred that same year, namely the implementation of the points-based system instead of the previous race-based system that privileged immigrants of Northern European descent, which promotes similar values as the UFO landing pad. This radical change posited Canada as the instigator of multiculturalism.

Archival material has been generously provided by Roland Rocque's personal archive, Dan Curtis's In Advance of the Landing (1993), and the Library and Archives Canada/Centennial Commission fond, © Government of Canada and reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2011).

Producer and Director: Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen
Editor: Marc Ripper