Director, Producer, Screenwriter

(b. December 10, 1931 Winnipeg, Manitoba)

One of Canada’s most innovative documentary filmmakers, Beryl Fox made seminal contributions to the development of CBC documentary in the sixties on such series as Document and This Hour Has Seven Days. After graduating from the University of Toronto, Fox joined the CBC as a script assistant and researcher and co-directed her first film in 1962. Her best films are typified by a well-defined social and political orientation.

She is the recipient of three Canadian Film Awards. The first was awarded for Summer in Mississippi (1964), a vivid observation of the civil rights movement that found Fox documenting the climate in that state following the murder of three young integration workers. Fox received her second and third awards, for Film of the Year and for TV Information, for The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam (1965), a raw and penetrating document of the Vietnam War that is especially notable for being one of the very few produced while the conflict was still ongoing. Her other notable credits include One More River (1963), an influential direct cinema documentary on the struggle for integration in the American South, The Single Woman and the DoubleStandard (1963), Youth in Search of Morality (1966) and Last Reflections on aWar (1968).

Following the Seven Days controversy in 1966 that resulted in the forced retirement of the show’s producers, Fox left the CBC in protest and worked for a year in New York. Between 1970 and 1976, she directed and produced many films for Hobel-Leiterman Productions in Toronto, including several in the Here Come the Seventies series. From 1976 to 1978 she was responsible for programme development for the National Film Board’s Ontario Region. She subsequently left to pursue a career as a producer, working on Claude Jutra’s Surfacing (1980) and By Design (1981).

Film and video work includes

Balance of Terror, 1963 (co-director; TV)
The Chief, 1964 (co-director; TV)
The Single Woman & The Double Standard, 1965 (director, producer; TV)
This Hour Has Seven Days, series, 1966 (interviewer; TV)
The Honourable René Lévesque, 1966 (director, producer; TV)
Youth: In Search of Morality, 1966 (director; TV)
Saigon, 1967 (director)
Last Reflections on a War: Bernard Fall, 1968 (director)
A View From the 21st Century, 1968 (director)
The Fabulous 60's, 1969 (director; TV)
Memorial to Martin Luther King, 1969 (producer; director)
The Way It Is, series, 1969 (segment director, TV)
North with the Spring, 1970 (director, producer, writer; TV)
Here Come the Seventies, series, 1970-1973 (director; co-producer with Douglas Leiterman; Philip S. Hobel; TV)
Toward the Year 2000: Habitat 2000, 1973 (director, writer; TV)
Toward the Year 2000: Jerusalem, 1973 (director, writer; TV)
Travel & Leisure, 1973 (director)
Walrus, 1973 (producer)
How to Fight With Your Wife; 1974 (director; TV)
Take My Hand, 1974 (director; writer)
Target the Impossible: Man into Superman, 1974 (director, writer; TV)
Wild Refuge, 1974 (director; writer)
The Visible Woman, 1975 (director; producer)
The Director, 1977 (producer with Ian McCutcheon)
The Edited Image, 1977 (producer with Ian McCutcheon)
Financing, 1977 (producer with Ian McCutcheon)
First Features, 1977 (producer with Ian McCutcheon)
Heavy Horse Pull, 1977 (producer)
The Market, 1977 (producer with Ian McCutcheon)
Performance, 1977 (producer with Ian McCutcheon)
The Producer, 1977 (producer with Ian McCutcheon)
Screenwriting, 1977 (producer with Ian McCutcheon)
Doctor Woman: The Life and Times of Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw, 1978 (producer)
Fields of Endless Day, 1978 (producer with Jennifer Hodge, Nick Ketchum, Sylvia Searles et al.)
Images of the Wild, 1978 (producer)
3 Track, 1979 (producer with Gilbert W. Taylor, Don Hopkins)
Bateman, 1979 (producer)
Black History, 1979 (producer)
Hot Wheels, 1979 (producer)
The Salvage Prince, 1979 (producer)
Surfacing, 1980 (producer)
By Design, 1981 (producer with Werner Aellen)

By: Tom McSorley