Donald Shebib, director of landmark Canadian film Goin' Down the Road, dead at 85

Donald Shebib, director of Goin' Down the Road, the 1970 best picture winner at the Canadian Film Awards and a movie perennially recognized as one of the country's best, has died. He was 85.

He died in hospital with family by his side in his native Toronto on Sunday, his son, music producer Noah (40) Shebib told CBC News in an email. A cause of death wasn't immediately available.

Shebib was working on a series of television documentaries in the 1960s when Goin' Down the Road was conceived, with a screenplay written by William Fruet, his colleague at CBC's The Way It Is.

Goin' Down the Road was made for just $87,000 and shot on 16-mm film, its low-budget and relatively inexperienced cast lending the film its verité, and often gritty feel.

"Nobody believed in the film, nobody. Then when the reaction to it was good, I was overwhelmed by it," Shebib told CBC in 2011.

The film, screenwriter Fruet and lead actors Doug McGrath and Paul Bradley would win awards at the Canadian Film Awards, the forerunner to the Canadian Screen Awards.

It was a key moment in Canada's nascent film industry, with future Toronto International Film Festival executive director Piers Handling writing in 1978, "Goin' Down The Road seemed to be our first step, tentative perhaps, but opening the floodgates to self-expression." It was, added George Melnyk in 2004's One Years of Canadian Cinema, "Canada's original road movie."

Goin' Down the Road was named the sixth-best Canadian film of all time by the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015, and it was part of the inaugural film class of the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada's MasterWorks in 2000.

The story tracks Pete and Joey, two poorly educated but enthusiastic dreamers who leave Cape Breton for what they believe will be brighter prospects in Ontario's capital.

"Their coming up is a definite social movement, the same kind of thing as in The Grapes of Wrath, or the people coming out of Appalachia," the Montreal Gazette wrote in one of the first profiles of Shebib, after the film's release.

The film mixed just enough comedic moments — hijinks at work, nights carousing under the lights of Yonge Street — as a respite from the profound struggles of the characters: There's mind-numbing assembly line work at a bottling plant, depressing accommodation at flophouses and tiny apartments, a shotgun marriage and an ill-timed pregnancy.

Pete and Joey are often the architects of their misfortune, their lives pocked by heavy drinking, a shaky work ethic, and casual misogyny. The young men get "chewed up by the cold concrete molars of late-sixties Toronto," in the words of film critic and historian Geoff Pevere in his 2012 study of the film.

In addition to cinematography from Richard Leiterman that showcased Toronto on film for one of the first times, poignancy was lent by background songs from nascent singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn.

For a film with more than its share of grim moments, Goin' Down the Road ironically has resonated through the years as much in Canadian comedy as drama, its influences felt in the hoser characters of shows like Fubar and Trailer Park Boys.