Julian Biggs

Julian Biggs (b. Port Perry, Ontario, 1920; d. Montreal, 1972) was a director, producer and administrator with the National Film Board of Canada for 20 years responsible for two Academy Award nominees, Herring Hunt (1953, as director) and Paddle to the Sea (1966, as producer).

A graduate of University of Toronto who served in the Canadian army and navy during World War II, Julian Biggs joined the National Film Board as production assistant and writer in 1951. He became the director of English production at the Board in 1966, then returned to active directing in 1968. He was responsible for several of the early NFB dramas, the Perspective series, 23 Skidoo and The Little Fellow from Gambo. He directed the Academy Award-nominated Herring Hunt and oversaw the production of nearly 200 films, including Don Owen’s High Steel and Notes for a Film about Donna and Gail, and Bill Mason’s Paddle to the Sea, the popular Oscar-nominated live-action short. In 1970, his profile of Newfoundland Prime Minister Joey Smallwood, A Little Fellow from Gambo, earned him a best director award at the Canadian Film Awards.

A National Film Board series of 30-minute dramas produced by Biggs (paralleled by a similar series in French known as Passe-partout) from 1956 to 1958. The emphasis was on documentary dramas in which social themes such as alcoholism, drug addition, adolescence, the elderly, racial problems etc. predominated.

One such film, Monkey on the Back, directed by Biggs, was a bleak, tragic story of man’s struggle to free himself, unsuccessfully, from drug addiction. Similar to Robert Anderson’s Drug Addict (1948), which had been banned in the U.S., it was the type of film that caused the Board to reconsider its role in producing socially relevant films. There was an unwritten policy and priority to shift away from social realism to the art of film.

In his authoritative Film Companion, Canadian film historian Peter Morris wrote this about the series that contained elements, which later become common in direct cinema.

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