This article presents a certain history of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), founded in 1967. Rather than offering a linear institutional narrative, it constructs a fragmented and experimental account shaped by email exchanges with the organization’s first two Executive Directors, Robert Fothergill and Kirwan Cox. Their sometimes conflicting recollections, humorous anecdotes, and reflections on aging, memory, and death form the basis of an assemblage-based methodology. The article embraces gaps and discontinuities in the historical record, treating them as spaces for further reflection rather than obstacles to coherence. This approach foregrounds the interplay between personal and collective memory, acknowledging the contingencies of how history is remembered, felt, and narrated. The structure of the article itself mirrors this methodology, unfolding in a series of “scenes” organized around evocative phrases drawn from the source material. This approach invites a reconsideration of how independent film history in Canada is constituted through the intersection of institutional mandates, personal narratives, and the ephemeral traces of lived experience.
Birdwise et al. (Wed,) studied this question.