The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) returns to the Toronto International Film Festival (September 9-19, 2010) with three films—the world premiere of Sturla Gunnarsson’s documentary about Canadian scientist and activist David Suzuki; the Canadian premiere of animator Claude Cloutier’s latest short; and Theodore Ushev’s animated tribute to filmmaker Arthur Lipsett.

Award-winning director Sturla Gunnarsson presents a biography of ideas featuring iconic Canadian scientist, educator, broadcaster and activist David Suzuki. At 73 years of age, Suzuki delivered what he describes as “a last lecture—a distillation of my life and thoughts, my legacy, what I want to say before I die.” In Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, Gunnarsson interweaves the lecture with scenes from the places and the major social, scientific, cultural and political events of the past 70 years of Suzuki’s life.

The short animated film The Trenches is an intense cinematic experience, a powerful anti-war film that asks the question, Why? Created through archival images masterfully contemporized by filmmaker Claude Cloutier’s India ink and brush artistry, The Trenches follows the inner reality of the protagonist, a young soldier on the battlefield, through half-real, half-surrealistic scenes that reveal the symbolic importance of the earth. The Trenches is produced by Marc Bertrand at the NFB’s French Animation Studio.

Theodore Ushev’s Lipsett Diaries is a descent into the maelstrom of anguish that tormented Arthur Lipsett, a famed Canadian experimental filmmaker who died at 49. Narrated by Xavier Dolan, the animated short uses a series of imagined diary entries transmuted into a clash of images and sounds to evoke the artist’s frenzied creations and dizzying descent into depression and madness. Lipsett Diaries is produced by Marc Bertrand at the NFB’s French Animation Studio.