Two of my final TIFF films were Les Ordres, a 1974 Quebec film about the FLQ crisis, and the eponymous Joy Division, about the great post-punk band from Manchester.

Les Ordres, by Michel Brault, is a docudrama about those caught in the round-up of suspected FLQ sympathizers in October 1970 under provisions of the draconian War Measures Act. Of the 497 arrested, 62 were charged and two convicted. Involved in a union? Hold mildly left-wing views? You painted a target on yourself, mon ami.

Fortunately, those days are behind us.

Brault won a best director award at the Cannes film festival in 1975 for his work.

There's no doubt Brault created a sober and compelling film here. But take this from journalist Walter Stewart's 1976 book But Not In Canada!:

Canadians cheered. We went berserk with delight. We lined up for the pollsters and wrote letters to our papers and clambered aboard the open-line radio shows to pour out our jubilation that the government, at last, was clamping down, that our boys, our very own boys, were just as willing to hurl people of the wrong political persuasion into the coop as any Russian commissar. At York University in Toronto, students held a large, noisy demonstration in favour of the repression.

I asked Brault if he ever considered working in any footage to show this side of the crisis. "I don't know anyone who was in favour of the War Measures Act," he said.

But if Stewart is to be believed (and I was 11 at the time of the FLQ crisis), many Canadians were. You'll never see that reality reflected in Brault's film.

Is there a Great Canadian Movie that shows the two solitudes on this painful issue from our nation's past?

Joy Division

Manchester, England gave the world the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-1970s, it was a bleak, depressed and depressing shithole.

A June 4, 1976 Sex Pistols gig there was only attended by about 40 people, but the musical repercussions would be felt for years. Many at the show felt inspired to form their own bands and join the musical rebellion that was punk. One such band was Warsaw, which begot Joy Division, which begot New Order.

Director Grant Gee's film tracks the development of the band and the evolution of Manchester.

The name Joy Division came from a 1965 novel, The House of Dolls, and referred to women forced into prostitution to serve the Nazis. They adopted that handle in late 1977.

While they started out as a punk band, they realized there were limits to 90-second outbursts of inchoate musical rage. Joy Division had more to say than that.

Unknown Pleasures, their first album-length recording, came out in 1979. To this day, it's impossible to listen to a track like She's Lost Control and recognize it as anything other than a Joy Division song.

Producer Martin Hannett (now deceased) played a major role in developing that unique sound. He cackled that because Joy Division knew nothing, he could do pretty much what he wanted.

Bassist Peter Hook says in the film that Hannett didn't write the songs or compose the music.

The band would record only one more full album, 1980's Closer.

The band's lyrics were often described as heavy, dark, tragic and doom-laden. And yet everyone was surprised when lead singer Ian Curtis hung himself -- even though he'd tried to kill himself earlier in the year with a drug overdose. His death came on the eve of what was to be a tour of America. He was 23 and a father.

Curtis's problems had been piling up. He developed epilepsy (a doctor's recommendation? Go to bed early, don't drink and avoid flashing lights). Married as a teen, that marriage was collapsing and had developed a relationship with a Belgian music promoter. He felt himself growing apart from the band.

Strangely, no one in the band took his lyrics as a cry for help. They thought it was just art! Agghh!!

Tony Wilson, the impressario behind the Factory Records label (he died last month), admitted on camera they were stupid.

Gee does a fine job of briskly walking us through this history, of entertaining our eyes while informing our minds. He's created a very solid film that's well worth seeing.

TIFF also screened Control, a biopic about Curtis. I've heard that will be hitting theatres sometime in October.