JOHN WALKER
b. 1952 in Montréal, Québec
|
|
This biography is Copyright © 2010 by Northernstars.ca and may not be reproduced without prior written consent. For more information about copyright, click here.
|
|
Born in Montreal, John Walker grew up in that magical time of early television when the often snow-laced black and white images served as inspiration for something beyond the reach and dreams of some Canadians. Starting as a photographer, Walker moved toward moving pictures and became a cinematographer working for Ottawa-based Crawley Films in the 1975. Some 40 years later his films have been widely broadcast and have garnered a wide and enviable range of awards from major international film festivals in Toronto, Vancouver, New York,
Los Angeles, Berlin and London.
From the Academy of Canadian
Cinema & Television Walker has received seventeen nominations and
awards including the coveted Donald Brittain Award for best social/political documentary Utshimassits: Place of the Boss; a
The Hand of Stalin; and
a Genie for best feature documentary for Strand: Under the Dark Cloth,
a personal portrait of his mentor, the photographer/
filmmaker Paul Strand. Moire than a decade later his film on the Cape Breton coal miners choir, Men of the Deeps, would pick up three Gemini awards including best
 performing arts, best documentary photography and best sound. Walker received a best
director nomination. The film garnered three million viewers with its
CTV broadcast.
Walker made several films for British television, tackling some of the
foremost tragedies of the twentieth century. He directed and
photographed two films in the BBC/October Films trilogy The Hand of Stalin, which addressed the devastating human suffering
under Stalin's regime. His opening film was called a masterpiece and
the films were broadcast to general acclaim: "oral history at its most
devastating," said London's Daily Mail; "words fail the enormity of
what these films reveal," said The Observer. The British Press Guild, Royal Television Society, and the Academy of
Canadian Cinema & Television nominated the trilogy for best series.
His
1991 groundbreaking film Distress Signals, based on the communication
theories of Canadian scholar Harold Innis lead a series of films on Britain's Channel 4
entitled “Channels of Resistance”. Other directorial credits for Channel 4 include Hidden Children, a film about children who concealed
their Jewish identity to survive the Holocaust, and Orphans of Manchuria, also nominated for the Donald Brittain Award, which dealt with
the plight of Japanese children orphaned in China at the end of WWII.
In 1996, Walker turned his attention to
a tragedy on Canadian soil, specifically a look into the  lives of the Mushuau Innu of Davis Inlet, Labrador. The result, Utshimassits: Place of the Boss brought another Donald Brittain Award, as well as awards from The Yorkton Film Festival, and the Atlantic Film Festival.
Walker's feature length films include the Genie nominated The Fairy Faith, the previously mentioned Strand: Under the Dark Cloth and
the critically acclaimed feature drama A Winter Tan, which received seven Genie
nominations including Best Motion Picture, Best Director and won Best Actor.
Walker co-produced, wrote and directed the provocative feature film Passage, a fiction/documentary for BBC and
History Television about the fabled Northwest Passage. Martin Knelman of The Toronto Star called it "One of the great
triumphs in Canadian documentary film history."
Walker, who has conducted master classes across the country, mentored
numerous emerging filmmakers and served as guest programmer for the Hot Docs Canadian International
Documentary Festival exhibited his deep passion for the documentary form by joining with other to co-found DOC, the Documentary Organization of Canada
(formerly Canadian Independent Film Caucus).
His most recent film, A Drummer's Dream dates back to Walker's own misspent youth. As he writes in the Director's Note, released as part of the media kit for the film, "In 1969, when I  was seventeen, our Montreal-based trio "Heavy" was invited to California to meet with Jim McQuinn of
The Byrds and Frank Zappa. Zappa wanted us to open his
concert in Haight Ashbury, California - the centre of the
universe as far as I was concerned. The thing is, a few days later
I was offered a summer job in a very cool photography studio.
I had been carrying a camera around my neck since I was eight
so this was a tough choice. My wise twenty-two year old band
leader said “we’ll consult the I Ching”. We threw the coins and
the great Chinese oracle revealed that I was faced with two
roads and whatever choice I made would be for life. After
several sleepless nights...
I chose the studio – gave away my drums and never touched a
pair of sticks again.
It was a painful choice and it resonated for years - every time I watched a band play I
would only see the drummer.
Almost forty years later when I heard my friend Nasyr was putting together a camp
with some of the best drummers in the world; I knew I had to go – with my cameras
rolling.
Go to John Walker's filmography.
|
|
|
