Evelyn Spice Cherry

After leaving the National Film Board, Cherry retired from filmmaking, albeit temporarily, returning to her earlier work as a teacher. Cherry and her husband raised a family together and, in 1960, the couple got back into film making in Saskatchewan to form Cherry Films Ltd, where they made more socially and environmentally conscious films. Lawrence died in 1966. Cherry finally retired from filmmaking in 1985, when she moved to British Columbia. She died in Victoria in 1990.

Since the NFB had been formed in part to create Canadian propaganda for the war effort, many of Cherry’s films revolved around a central theme of cooperation and coming together to achieve a unified goal. Farm Electrification (1946), for example, is a film that centres on a rural Manitoba community that comes together to bring hydroelectricity to their farms. Those in the community who oppose the plan are eventually won over, recognizing that the wide-reaching benefits outweigh the costs. Similarly, her film Children First (1944) spoke to the importance of organized consumption and assures the audience that sharing guarantees that “there will be enough to go around.” These “waste not, want not” messages were abundant in NFB films throughout the 1940s, but would go on to cost Cherry and many others at the NFB their jobs after the war, as post-World War II communist paranoia surrounded the NFB and other government agencies.

In 1941, Grierson invited Cherry and her husband to join the newly formed National Film Commission, later renamed the National Film Board. Cherry was placed in charge of the agricultural film unit, where she made films about farm life and food production. Cherry’s accession to such a high position in the NFB was unheard of at the time and is attributable to the scarcity of available talented filmmakers after the outbreak of the Second World War. Nonetheless, her work was highly influential and Cherry is regarded as a pioneer in the Canadian female documentary filmmaker movement. Cherry made 128 films at the NFB during her 10-year tenure.

While in England, Spice met her fellow Canadian and future film making partner and husband, Lawrence Cherry. In 1939, after the Second World War was declared, Evelyn and Lawrence returned to Canada, where they worked as independent film makers. The couple worked as a team, both being skilled cinematographers and editors, although Lawrence often worked best under his wife's direction.

Spice moved to London, England in 1931, where she began working at the Government Post Film Unit. She worked under John Grierson, whom she would later go on to work with at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in Canada. While working at the GPO, Spice met and worked with members of the British Documentary Film Movement. She became the only Canadian and the only woman in the movement.

Evelyn Spice was born in 1904 in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. She began her career teaching public school. In 1929, she graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism and started working at the Regina Leader-Post as the society columnist.