Donald Brittain
| Donald Brittain | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 10, 1928 Ottawa, Ontario |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Montreal, Quebec |
| Known for | Filmmaker |
| Awards | Order of Canada |
Donald Brittain, OC (June 10, 1928 – July 21, 1989) was a film director and producer with the National Film Board of Canada.
Fields of Sacrifice (1964) is considered Brittain's first major film as director.[1] His other notable directorial credits include the 1965 documentaries Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen and Memorandum and the Genie Award-winning 1979 documentary Paperland: The Bureaucrat Observed. He also directed the first-ever IMAX film, Tiger Child for Expo '70, and Earthwatch, a 70mm film for Expo 86.[2]
He wrote the 1975 Oscar-nominated short documentary Whistling Smith. He co-directed the 1976 feature documentary Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry which garnered 6 Canadian Film Awards and an Academy Award nomination.
Brittain also directed the three-part CBC-coproduced series The Champions, chronicling the lives and battles of Canadian political titans René Lévesque and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His most ambitious project was The King Chronicle, a three-part 1987-88 television series about the remarkable career of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.[3]
He won the Gemini Award for best screenplay and direction for the 1985 drama Canada's Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks.
As NFB producer, Brittain's credits included Arthur Lipsett's A Trip Down Memory Lane.[4]
Often a narrator of his own documentaries, Brittain also lent his voice to the animated mockumentary What on Earth![5]
Contents
Lifetime achievement awards and posthumous honours
In 1989, Brittain was the recipient of a Margaret Collier Award. In 1990, he was posthumously appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of "his masterful visual records of our social and cultural past.[1]
The Donald Brittain Award for the best political or social documentary presented by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television at the Gemini Awards and more recently, the Canadian Screen Awards, are named in his honour.
Brittain is interred in Ottawa, Ontario's Beechwood Cemetery.
Further reading
- Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
External links
- Donald Brittain at the Internet Movie Database
- Donald Brittain playlist at the National Film Board of Canada
- Donald Brittain at The Canadian Encyclopedia
- Donald Brittain at the Canadian Film Encyclopedia
- Donald Brittain at the Museum of Broadcast Communications
- Articles with hCards
- No local image but image on Wikidata
- 1928 births
- 1989 deaths
- Canadian film directors
- Officers of the Order of Canada
- Film directors from Ottawa
- Film directors from Montreal
- Gemini Award winners
- Anglophone Quebec people
- National Film Board of Canada people
- Canadian documentary film producers
- Directors of Genie Award winners for Best Documentary Film
- Canadian documentary film directors
