Canada: Arts & Media

Canadian visual art found a defining voice in the Group of Seven, a collective of landscape painters who from the 1920s onward depicted the country's wilderness in bold, stylized forms and helped establish a distinctly national school of painting. Indigenous artistic traditions run alongside this settler-descended canon; institutions such as the Indigenous Art Centre preserve and exhibit thousands of works by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis artists.

In literature, the mid-20th century saw the emergence of what is often called CanLit, a body of English- and French-language writing that sought a distinct national identity apart from British and American traditions. Margaret Atwood became one of its most prominent figures, and her 1972 critical study Survival offered an influential analysis of recurring themes in Canadian writing.

Film and television developed largely through public institutions rather than a commercial studio system. The National Film Board of Canada, established by the federal government in 1939, built an international reputation for documentary and animated filmmaking, and later fostered Indigenous filmmakers such as Alanis Obomsawin, who joined the Board in 1967 and became one of the country's most distinguished documentarians. The federal government further supported a feature-film industry in 1967 with the creation of the Canadian Film Development Corporation, which invested in productions and provided loans and grants to filmmakers.