Giles Walker (January 17, 1946 – March 23, 2020) was a Scottish-born Canadian film director.

Biography

Giles Walker, born in 1946 in

Dundee Dundee (; ; or , ) is the List of towns and cities in Scotland by population, fourth-largest city in Scotland. The mid-year population estimate for the locality was . It lies within the eastern central Lowlands on the north bank of the Firt ...

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

, received a B.A. from the

University of New Brunswick The University of New Brunswick (UNB) is a public university with two primary campuses in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick. It is the oldest English language, English-language university in Canada, and among the oldest public universiti ...

and an M.A. from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

Film School in 1972. He joined the

National Film Board of Canada The National Film Board of Canada (NFB; ) is a Canadian public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary films, animation, web documentaries, and altern ...

soon after, directing documentaries, then switching to dramas in 1977. ''Bravery in the Field'' was nominated for a live-action short Oscar in 1979. ''The Masculine Mystique'' (directed with John N. Smith), the first of a trio of NFB movies dealing with issues of gender relations, showed Walker's experimental side, working with non-professional actors and the technique of improvisation. The two other films in the series, however, moved closer to an easy, palatable Hollywood style – successfully in ''90 Days'' but less so in ''The Last Straw''. Perhaps Walker's most successful fictional work is ''Princes in Exile'', a film about a summer camp for children with cancer, notable for delicate treatment of the subject and a moving lack of sentimentality. Walker died in March 2020 after a 10-year battle with brain cancer.

Biography

Partial filmography

References

External links

See also