Montreal: Michael Rubbo came to Canada 30 years ago, and almost to the month, has returned to his native homeland as the new head of documentary production at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Rubbo is based in Sydney where he started his duties with abc Nov. 1. He’ll report to program director Penny Chapman.

‘I will be responsible for approximately 120 to 200 hours a year of documentary programming, about 60% to 70% of which are acquisitions and coproductions. So my connections with Canada become interesting,’ he said.

Rubbo says his department will take a light approach to production, shooting on Digital Betacam and Hi-8.

‘My interests are in the Griersonian (nfb founder John Grierson) tradition of documentaries as social conscience,’ he says.

‘As well as being entertaining and marvelous character studies, I think documentaries should show the society we live in or the international society in ways that help people to be good citizens.’

Documentaries are really big on abc, he says, ‘something like 22% of all primetime programming.’

Behind closed doors

Rubbo says one of the major challenges at abc will be ‘to get the documentary cameras behind closed doors, especially to places they haven’t gone – in business and politics. I would be looking to make a strand of what we call direct-cinema films, fly-on-the-wall portraits in politics and business,’ he says.

Rubbo says he’ll try to convince people at abc to pursue this direction by using Canadian examples like the Barry Greenwald film The Negotiator, a story of the uaw negotiations with Pratt & Whitney.

Universal themes dealing with the human condition are also of interest, he says, adding Canada and Australia share common realities including ‘vast open land spaces and sometimes volatile relations with our Native peoples.’

‘I’m not just interested in stories per se,’ he says. ‘They have to have issues, characters, plus stories, as Nettie Wild did in a film for (cbc’s) Witness called Blockade, a West Coast Native land claims story.’

Destination Monde

Rubbo says he is especially keen on producing an abc version of the Radio-Canada competitive documentary youth series, La Course Destination Monde.

A key person on Rubbo’s staff is Harry Bardwell, head of international coproduction. ‘(Bardwell) will be roaming the world looking for deals that make sense for both sides,’ says Rubbo.

‘It would be interesting to have good films that are overtly Canadian,’ he adds.

Rubbo’s filmography includes social and political documentaries produced at the nfb including the Vietnam War film Sad Song of Yellow Skin (1970); Waiting for Fidel (1974), the story of Joey Smallwood’s attempt to visit the Cuban dictator; and the memorable visit with novelist/poet Margaret Atwood called Once in August.

In 1983, Rubbo left the nfb and subsequently wrote and directed four Tales for All children’s films for producer Rock Demers: The Peanut Butter Solution; Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveler, which won scores of festival prizes and sold to 80 countries; the sequel, The Return of Tommy Tricker; and Vincent and Me, an Emmy and Parent’s Choice Award winner.

‘I was somewhat unlucky in my feature film career here,’ Rubbo says. ‘When I was making my documentaries they were very personal and I was often the bumbling protagonist. This persona of the filmmaker/journalist has now become quite common, but in the days I was doing it, it was considered as very flaky.

‘With the children’s films, I think Rock Demers was also a bit ahead of the times in the sense that when he started the series in the early ’80s there wasn’t the same concern about making non-violent children’s material. LRB