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Donald Everett Shebib (27 January 1938 – 5 November 2023) was a Canadian film and television director. Shebib was a central figure in the development of English Canadian cinema who made several short documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada and CBC Television in the 1960s before turning to feature films, beginning with the influential Goin' Down the Road (1970) and what many call his masterpiece, Between Friends (1973). He soon became frustrated by the bureaucratic process of film funding in Canada and chronic problems with distribution as well as a string of box office disappointments. (2025). 9781442656208, University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9781442656208 After Heartaches (1981), he made fewer films for theatrical release and worked more in television.
Shebib was Noah "40" Shebib's father.
Shebib grew up in an economically precarious household, and in a neighbourhood where he felt he was an outsider, "growing up with a name like Shebib, very working class, being raised a Catholic in Orange Ontario", conceding he "probably took it more sensitively" than he had to, adding that he was always shy in high school: "I didn't know where I fit in. I grew up feeling pretty inferior." In a 2011 interview with Andrea Nemetz in the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Shebib said: "I was aware of migratory experiences – like the Okies in California in the dust bowl. I had a cousin who came to stay with us in Toronto in the late 1950s and he tried to make a go of it and couldn't and went back to the Maritimes."
The young Shebib grew up loving sports, comic books, and Hollywood "chestnuts" or vintage films, the family acquired their first television set in 1952; for a certain time, Shebib refused to watch any film made after 1940. (2025). 9781442645899, University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9781442645899
In 1961, Shebib enrolled in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where he gained early experience working on Roger Corman productions, notably as a cinematographer and assistant editor on Dementia 13 (1962), his classmate Francis Ford Coppola's first film, and The Terror (1963). (2025). 9789042012097, Editions Rodopi. ISBN 9789042012097 He also made his earliest . In 1965, he graduated with a Master of Arts, but decided to return home rather than pursue a career in Hollywood.
There's more of a chance here... and it's much easier to get started. There isn't really all that much filmmaking to be done in the States. Educational TV has opened up some opportunities for the documentary, but other than that there is nothing at all. Period. Flat. Nothing exists. Nothing at all.
In unison, the long promise of the Canadian industry and Don Shebib seemed to be coming to fruition this year: Shebib had made the film which was the confirmation of all his earlier work; there were six strong feature entries in the Canadian Film Awards; the Awards were to be carried on network television; the films were booked to open across the country with full publicity—all firsts. But instead both had their heads bitten off. Today, Don Shebib says he will never again enter a film in the Canadian Film Awards, that he needs a job and would take one in the U.S. in a minute. This is not sour grapes from someone who's inadequate. This is English Canada's best feature filmmaker reacting to the treatment of the best feature film he's ever made.The awards scheduled for the following year were cancelled and did not return until 1975. Shebib did enter his next film, Second Wind (1976) and won the award for Best Editing. Neither it nor Fish Hawk (1979) were commercial successes. He found success once more with Heartaches (1981), described by Wyndham Wise as a variation of Goin' Down the Road with a pair of working-class women.
Beginning in the 1980s, Shebib worked primarily in television, but occasionally returned to feature films with Running Brave (1983), Change of Heart (1993), The Ascent (1994), and Down the Road Again (2011), a sequel to Goin' down the Road, featuring some of the original cast members as well as a new generation of characters.
In between The Ascent and Down the Road Again, Shebib said there had been little work, though he had written a few scripts. There was some talk of Shebib directing Rob Stefaniuk in a film called Bart Fargo, an homage to La Petomane, in 2004 and 2005, but it is unclear as to whether it was made, completed, and released. In 2008, he was quoted as saying that Canada was a great place to make a first film, but "a hard place to keep things going."
The director's later television work included By Reason of Insanity (1982), Slim Obsession (1984) both made for the CBC series For the Record and sold to overseas markets, and the television movies The Climb (1986), The Little Kidnappers (1990) and The Pathfinder (1996). In the 21st century, the Gilbert and Sullivan documentary A Song to Sing-O (2007) was well received.
Drama series work included The Edison Twins, Night Heat, Counterstrike and The Zack Files.
Shebib watched Turner Classic Movies "religiously", and after John Ford, his favourite directors were Frank Capra, William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Marcel Carné, David Lean ("especially his early stuff") and F.W. Murnau (" is one of my favorite films"):
These films made from 1930 to 1934, the Pre-Code films, are among the best Hollywood films ever made. People always think 1939 was the sort of glory year of American film. Actually I'd say it was 1933. The films made before the code were infinitely superior.He said he approved of a few contemporary Canadian feature filmmakers, but found CBC film dramas "just dreadful" and "boring", dismissing them as "silly stories of girls growing up in the prairies", while at the same time he found the broadcaster's "tape dramas" were still "wonderful, they still have that expertise".
In 2011, Shebib told Geoff Pevere he had expanded his range of Hollywood cinematic viewing from watching only films up to 1950 to films made as late as and even later than 1950, but contended that movies mainly "went in the toilet" after 1950 (with some notable exceptions like Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones, a "perfect movie" made in 1958). His dislike for the styles (and subjects) employed by contemporary films was matched by his "seething disdain of critics" and a "testy" ambivalence with respect to the quality of his own work (he called himself "lazy and sloppy" in the execution of his work): Pevere's assessment: "Shebib is an old-fashioned traditionalist adrift in a modernist cultural movement, and therefore as much an outsider as anybody he'd make movies about." His feelings of ambivalence extend to a "reluctance to accept being the designated representative of Canadian anything": "I don't like the idea of suddenly being used as a model for Canada or something. Why take me – whatever my feelings are – and blame that on the Canadian people?"
In the mid 1970s, Peter Harcourt remarked on the frequent moments of silence denoting introspection in Shebib's films, both in the early documentaries and in the feature films, a "feeling of emptiness, of restlessness, often of irrelevance". Shebib places great value on "male comradeship" and "the need of real challenges to give individuals a sense of their dignity". Piers Handling noted that Shebib was so preoccupied with male bonding that women were absent from his work prior to the start of his feature film career, and likewise identified a tension between the desire to transcend boundaries and existential limits. Sam Weisberg asserts that "all of his films share a common interest in, and empathy with, the extraordinary aspirations of ordinary people," whether "goofy teenagers" trying to make it as a rock band ( Rip-Off), a "bored businessman" who takes up jogging ( Second Wind), or an Italian prisoner of war "itching to climb Mount Kenya" ( The Ascent).
Shebib still considered himself a sociologist at heart, and suggested his films had a strong sociological basis, incorporating social commentary, human relationships being a frequent theme. However, he never considered himself an intellectual: he "didn't talk like one"; not that he was anti-intellectual, just "anti-bullshit": politically "liberal" but not laissez-faire or "bleeding heart", and with "socialist leftist leanings", but believing that Marxism is "just another form of bullshit", not that capitalists were "any better".
As late as 1993, Goin' Down the Road still had "legendary status" and as of the Toronto International Film Festival's most recent poll of greatest Canadian films, is ranked 6th. It had done more than any other work to advance the Canadian film industry at the time of its release. Within a few years, Shebib's body of work had made him a "unique and recognizable film presence" in Canada and beyond, "verging on international stature." Scholar Katherine A. Roberts remarks how, since the release of Shebib's film, "numerous Canadian filmmakers have sought to explore the mobility/masculinity nexus as it relates to landscape and the national narrative."
Sam Weisberg opines that, with the exception of Between Friends (1973), none of Shebib's feature films made after Goin' Down the Road have quite the same resonance.
Despite his artistic vision and technical skills, a perception grew that Shebib was "his own worst publicity agent", complaining regularly that his scripts were weak or else that he had difficulties with actors. By 1993, after having directed eight feature length dramatic films, around thirty documentaries, and "scores of TV dramas and series" over twenty-five years, Shebib was finding it hard to find work, even in television: "People have given me the reputation of being terrible-tempered on the set, of being hard to work with. But I don't know where that comes from, I'm really the softest guy in the world." When Geoff Pevere interviewed him in 2011, then aged 73, he found Shebib "generous, courteous, and thoughtful", but he had certainly not mellowed: "He can't help himself, even if it has cost him dearly in professional terms." (2025). 9781442614109, University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9781442614109
In 2017, Shebib was presented with a Directors Guild of Canada Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2011, Shebib said of his hobbies and sporting life that he was "a very serious, obsessive person. If it isn't golf it's football or it's stamp collecting. And I was a serious airplane model maker."
Their two children Noah and Suzanna are both involved in the performing arts: Suzanna began her career an actress, while Noah, better known as OVO Sound's "40", an actor and music producer (the siblings have an older half-sister, Zoe). Suzanna is now a chemistry teacher at Toronto's Central Technical School.
Shebib attended classes at UCLA with Francis Ford Coppola and worked with him on Dementia 13. He also "hung out" with Jim Morrison during this period, and one summer Beach Boys guitarist Al Jardine stayed with him and his roommates, sharing a love of Gilbert and Sullivan musical numbers.
On his return to Toronto, Shebib met and befriended writer and editor William Fruet when he began working for the CBC on The Way It Is. (2025). 9781442645899, University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9781442645899 He was close friends and dated dancer and columnist Zella Wolofsky who provided guidance on the beginning and ending of Nightalk. She and his son Noah Shebib shared Don's primary caregiving during his final weeks alive.
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