Michael Rubbo

Michael Rubbo is an Australian documentary filmmaker, screenwriter, and director known for his innovative and personal approach to nonfiction storytelling. A longtime contributor to the National Film Board of Canada, Rubbo crafted documentaries that blended observation with subjective narration, often inserting himself into the narrative—a style that influenced later generations of documentary filmmakers. His notable works include Sad Song of Yellow Skin (1970), which explored the impact of the Vietnam War on civilians, and Waiting for Fidel (1974), a unique take on political documentary. Beyond documentaries, Rubbo also directed children’s films such as The Peanut Butter Solution (1985) and later pursued a career as an author and painter, continuing his creative exploration across different mediums.

Works

Much Ado About Something

Did Christopher Marlowe write the works of Shakespeare?

Release Date2001-09-08

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd Himself

Vote Count7

Unfinished Diary

In this heartwarming docudrama, Chilean immigrant Marilú Mallet strives to make a film about her experience of deep isolation. Her English-speaking husband, a prominent film director, criticizes her subjective approach to filmmaking; her young son, raised in Quebec, speaks only French. Interviews with Isabel Allende and other Chilean exiles reveal a deep bond in this powerful and resonant film about language and genre, exile and immigration.

Release Date1982-01-02

Charactersd The husband

Vote Count2

Margaret Atwood: Once in August

In Margaret Atwood: Once in August, filmmaker Michael Rubbo attempts to discover what shapes the celebrated writer's fiction and what motivates her characters. As one of Canada's most distinguished poets and novelists, Atwood is also one of this country's most elusive literary figures.

Release Date1984-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd Himself

Vote Count2

Sad Song of Yellow Skin

Filmed in Saigon in 1970, this documentary observes the effects of the Vietnam War on daily life away from the battlefield. Through the perspectives of three young American journalists, the film records encounters with street children, refugees, bar workers, and aid efforts shaped by the American presence in the city.

Release Date1970-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Charactersd Narrator

Vote Count3

Waiting for Fidel

This feature-length documentary from 1974 takes viewers inside Fidel Castro's Cuba. A movie-making threesome hope that Fidel himself will star in their film. The unusual crew consists of former Newfoundland premier Joseph Smallwood, radio and TV owner Geoff Stirling and NFB film director Michael Rubbo. What happens while the crew awaits its star shows a good deal of the new Cuba, and also of the three Canadians who chose to film the island. (NFB)

Release Date1975-11-14

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Charactersd Self

Vote Count5

Temiscaming, Québec

Temiscaming, Québec is the story of a town's struggle to survive after its main source of employment, the CIP mill, closed down. Part I tells what steps the workers, townspeople and ex-CIP managers took to reopen a mill co-owned and co-managed by the workers; Part II explains the new corporate ownership of the mill, how it works, and its growing pains.

Release Date1976-10-20

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count1

Race Around the World

Race Around the World was an Australian documentary series produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1997 and 1998 . It was based on a Canadian television series. Both seasons were hosted by Richard Fidler, a former member of the Doug Anthony All Stars comedy group.

Release Date1997-06-02

DepartmentCreator

JobCreator

Vote Count1

Vincent and Me

Jo, a talented young art student from Quebec, attracts the attention of a mysterious European art dealer who buys her drawings. When she later learns that the works are being sold as newly discovered drawings by Vincent van Gogh, she sets out to uncover the truth—traveling first to Amsterdam and ultimately to 19th-century Arles to confront the painter himself.

Release Date1990-12-13

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count6

Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller

When the joker Tommy Tricker plays some practical jokes on some of his friends, his best friend Ralph, a stamp collector, discovers the secret of "stamp travel" to make him travel around the world on a stamp to bring back the mysterious Charles Merriweather, who never returned on a stamp for 75 years.

Release Date1988-12-08

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count16

The Peanut Butter Solution

Peanut butter is the secret ingredient for magic potions made by two friendly ghosts. Eleven-year-old Michael loses all of his hair when he gets a fright and uses the potion to get his hair back, but too much peanut butter causes things to get a bit hairy.

Release Date1985-12-06

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count52

Adieu Alouette

Release Date1973-01-03

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Episode Count1

Adventures

This short live-action film tells the story of a little raccoon who encounters many adventures when he strays from home to explore the world.

Release Date1968-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Challenger: An Industrial Romance

Follows the development of Canadair's super-executive jet. A totally new type of aircraft, it is faster, cheaper to fly, and more comfortable than any other business jet. Would it make it off the drawing board and into the air? The film captures the spirit of the Canadian air transport industry and its attempt to compete with its American counterparts...

Release Date1980-07-09

DepartmentDirecting

JobCo-Director

Vote Count1

The Return of Tommy Tricker

Welcome to the world of stamps with Tommy Tricker and friends as they learn the magic of travelling through time and space for the mere price of the postage. Though of course, nothing is as easy as it seems as they soon learn when they try to rescue Charles Merriweather, a stamp traveller frozen in time since his last attempt at stamp- travelling, 65 years ago. But Charles turns out to be a girl, his sister Molly! And she is rapidly turning into an old woman. To find a cure, Tommy takes off in a race against the time that leads him and Molly to the exotic and magical South Pacific islands.

Release Date1994-10-07

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count5

Atwood and Family

Internationally acclaimed author Margaret Atwood has achieved distinction as a poet and as a novelist. Yet she remains a most elusive literary figure. In a quiet encounter on Atwood's island retreat, the film's director seeks to discover what shapes this celebrated Canadian writer's fiction and what motivates her characters.

Release Date1985-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

River (Planet Earth)

River (Planet Earth) is a student's audio-visual presentation of a river system and the importance of water to humans, to his professor who hates to be bored. Both serious and humorous, the film shows how water sustains life, feeds industry, provides power and irrigates the land. It shows how water is inverted, dammed, used and expelled. It talks of pollution. The film demonstrates how water affects the economy, sociology and ecology of a country.

Release Date1977-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

The Bear and the Mouse

A hungry bear shows mercy to a mouse in a variation on Aesop's classic fable, "The Lion and the Mouse". When he later finds himself in a pickle, he resigns to his fate, certain that the grateful rodent is too tiny to be of any help.

Release Date1966-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Daisy: The Story of a Facelift

Middle-aged NFB producer Daisy Bellefeuille is about to get a facelift. Rubbo follows the process through her discussions with her friends, consultations with physicians, observation of other facelift patients, and finally the operation and its aftermath. There's also an amateur-intellectual sidebar on the history of physical appearance and its cultural importance- Altogether, a gripping, hour-long documentary about a woman and her facelift.

Release Date1982-12-11

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Log House

This film is about the building of a traditional log cabin in Québec. It starts with the tree and finishes with the housewarming. While it is not a realistic housing option for many Canadians, it does provide encouragement for all of us to re-examine the resources around us that we may not be using effectively, if at all.

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Wet Earth and Warm People

This documentary by Michael Rubbo (Waiting for Fidel) offers candid glimpses of Indonesia and its people. Filming in and around the capital of Jakarta, the cameras follow where chance leads, capturing the flavour of life in this fertile crescent of tropical islands. Throughout the film, the focus is on a society caught between the past and the conflicting options for the future - to change or not to change from long-established patterns of life to ones more influenced by western technology.

Release Date1971-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Maverick on a Mobile

A documentary about Graeme Campbel MP, an Australian federal member of Parliament.

Release Date1997-06-15

DepartmentProduction

JobExecutive Producer

Cold Pizza

An engaging story of young enterprise, pitfalls, and eventual success that all young viewers will enjoy. It is about two young Greek boys in Montréal who try to earn some extra money for a trip to their sunny homeland by delivering pizzas. The misadventures they encounter and how they surmount them make an amusing story, full of youthful initiative.

Release Date1972-01-01

DepartmentProduction

JobProducer

Vote Count1

OK ... Camera

This documentary film is an exploration of Québec’s feature film industry. The film takes a look at the people who have succeeded in this unique milieu (Geneviève Bujold is one) or failed; at its movies, which run the gamut from hard-core skinflicks to such highly acclaimed films as Mon Oncle Antoine, and at its audiences, which number in the millions.

Release Date1972-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Persistent and Finagling

A group of Montreal women form a group to fight air pollution by local factories.

Release Date1971-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Bate's Car: Sweet as a Nut

This short film presents Mr. Bate, an inventor who discovers a substitute for gasoline in barnyard manure. Even though he fits the classic mould of single-minded know-how and practical dreamer, his discovery is tried and tested. He demonstrates how his home-made digester does turn manure into potent methane gas that powers his auto. And for good measure, he demonstrates his latest sustainable invention – a bicycle powered by the bumps on the road.

Release Date1974-01-01

DepartmentProduction

JobProducer

Vote Count1

Sir! Sir!

Here is what happened in a Toronto classroom when teachers occupied the children's desks and children became the teachers. The film grew out of another, Mrs. Ryan's Drama Class, where young children found their way into creative drama. There is food for thought in this impromptu reversal of roles.

Release Date1968-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

I Am an Old Tree

A picture of life in Cuba by a filmmaker who believes in getting into people's lives and letting ideas seep out of what he finds. Among the people shown are a doctor who came back to Cuba, a high-school student whose school-based radio-assembly work and classes last until 10:00 p.m., and a tobacco farmer who now owns his land. For all of them the new Cuba has done much and promises more.

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Murder on the Shanghai

A murder mystery improvised by strangers on a ship traveling from Shanghai to Hong Kong.

Release Date2012-04-27

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

That Mouse

In this children’s film, a white mouse cavorts about the forest, mostly on the back of a bumbling black bear, creating such a stir that other forest creatures (a deer, a tortoise, a hawk and a hound) have to put a stop to it. Animals speak with human voices and “act” out their parts.

Release Date1967-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Courage to Change

This feature documentary is a sequel to the 1966 documentary The Things I Cannot Change, which, by focusing on the Bailey family of Montreal, provided an anatomy of poverty in North America. Courage to Change explores what has happened to the Baileys in the intervening 18 years.

Release Date1986-01-01

DepartmentProduction

JobProducer

Vote Count1