Michael Rubbo

Did Christopher Marlowe write the works of Shakespeare?

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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