Year: 1969
Language: English
Format: 16mm Black & White
Runtime: 40 min
Director: Donald Shebib
Executive Producer: Ross McLean
Writer: Donald Shebib
Cinematographer: Donald Shebib
Editor: Donald Shebib
Sound: Patrick Spence-Thomas, William Rhodes
Narration: Jon Granik
Production Company: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Director Don Shebib’s most distinguished short film, Good Times Bad Times is a moving and powerful documentary about the men who fought in the two World Wars and the effects their experiences had on their lives. Interviews with veterans are intercut with combat footage and old photographs. Shebib interweaves disparate elements to achieve a poetically balanced structure and reveals in detail how the comradeship of soldiers is really a form of love.

A personal, passionate elegy for the past, Good Times Bad Times is a tautly structured, elegantly crafted dirge that reflects the guilt and madness of war. It benefits from the inherent sense of irrelevance that serves as the central mood for virtually all of Shebib’s films, and has been justly compared to such pacifist classics as Georges Franju’s Hôtel des invalides (1952) and Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955).

The film was a double winner at the Canadian Film Awards, claiming prizes for Feature Documentary and Sound Design.