The National Film Board of Canada has a highly honourable record of making or promoting movies which would have been unlikely to survive through the millstones of commercial production. Although the credits of most films are of such Byzantine complexity that it is virtually impossible to work out who was responsible for anything, ‘Beautiful Dreamers’ seems to have resulted from a partnership between the Board, other public bodies, and commercial companies, and since a story set in a Canadian mental hospital in 1880 does not strike one as immediately bankable, that may have been just as well.