Terence Macartney-Filgate was a British-Canadian film director who directed, wrote, produced or shot more than 100 films in a career spanning more than 50 years.
18 Facts About Terence Macartney-Filgate
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Terence Macartney-Filgate was only 15 years old at the outbreak of World War II and ultimately joined the Royal Air Force as a flight engineer, flying more than a dozen operations in Europe.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate then went on to obtain a degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University, in 1946, and held down a succession of jobs before immigrating to Canada.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate, who had long admired the work of the National Film Board of Canada, applied repeatedly for a job with Canada's public producer, before being hired as a scriptwriting assistant in 1954.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate soon graduated from assistant scriptwriter to director-photographer and producer and directed his first film in 1956.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate worked the NFB's Unit B, with such filmmakers as Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroitor, Stanley Jackson, Michel Brault, and Pierre Perrault, all of whom were at the forefront of the new unscripted, observational documentaries.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate worked extensively as a director and cinematographer on the Candid Eye series.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate was personally responsible for seven of the fourteen films and he helped shape the series' unscripted and observational approach.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate was the principal cameraman on Primary, a seminal documentary about the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary campaign between senators John F Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate soon left Drew Associates and worked freelance throughout most of the sixties in New York City.
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The film, Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World, went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, with Clarke credited as the sole director, despite Terence Macartney-Filgate directing the majority of it.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate returned to the NFB briefly to work on the 1963 series Lewis Mumford on the City, co-directing four of the six films.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate won a Peabody Award for his 1964 documentary, Changing World: South African Essay and, working again with Robert Hughes, conducted a rare interview with Vladimir Nabokov.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate returned to Canada in the late sixties and again rejoined the NFB briefly to work on the Challenge for Change series, before moving to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate won two Canadian Film Awards for Blood and Fire and The Hottest Show on Earth and received an Ontario Film Institute Award in 1981.
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In May 2011, Terence Macartney-Filgate was given Hot Doc's outstanding achievement award, which included a retrospective of his work.
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Also in 2011, Terence Macartney-Filgate was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
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Terence Macartney-Filgate died in Toronto on 11 July 2022 at the age of 97.