Digital genre fiction at the National Film Board of Canada: Civic storyworlds,Indigenous Futurisms,and environmental memory

Abstract

This article examines how the National Film Board of Canada’s digital storytelling projects reframe genre fiction as multi-media public literature. Focusing on Biidaaban: First Light, Circa 1948, Bear 71, and Motto, it argues that these works assemble speculative fiction, noir, documentary, and ghost story conventions within interactive environments that foreground participation, memory, and ethical relation. The analysis situates NFBC digital projects within an institutional history marked by the Canadian aporetic condition, a structural tension between inclusive cultural claims and enduring settler-colonial legacies. Drawing on genre theory, digital media analysis, Indigenous Futurisms, and co-creation frameworks, the article traces how interface design, database architectures, and collaborative authorship shape literary meaning. Each case study shows how genre operates as a flexible method that organizes voice, space, and data into storyworlds attentive to resurgence, ecological entanglement, and distributed memory. Taken together, these projects demonstrate how a publicly funded studio can support interactive narratives that circulate as world-literary artefacts, sustain interpretive complexity, and model digital literature as a civic practice embedded in institutional infrastructure.

Keywords

digital storytelling genre fiction Indigenous Futurism interactive documentary National Film Board of Canada public institutions world literature

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