A booming, diverse population in Calgary’s Northeast has big hopes and gnawing worries

At the 1969 Canadian Film Awards, one of its jurors, the young British director Peter Watkins, declared that there was no Canadian film industry. There could hardly have been a more damning, or more humiliating, moment for such a charge to land. The CFA is a government-funded institution created with the express intent of legitimizing (and, by extension, catalyzing) a homegrown film industry. But Watkins’s complaint was legitimate: for the first time in the CFA’s twenty-year history, there were no feature films for him or his fellow jurors to view. Watkins also levied aesthetic...