One of Canada’s most noted filmmakers, Robin Spry, died in a car accident on March 28 at age 65.

The son of CBC cofounder Graham Spry, Robin Spry began his filmmaking career at the National Film Board in 1964. Over the next 14 years, he became one of the NFB’s most important documentary filmmakers, working as a producer, director and writer – capturing Genies, Geminis and a Peabody throughout his career.

Spry’s breakthrough film was the 1973 documentary Action: The October Crisis of 1970, for which he compiled contemporary news footage to portray the tense circumstances surrounding the kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross and the death of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. He followed this success with many notable films, including One Man (1977), Drying Up the Streets (1978) and Suzanne (1980). He was also one of the exec producers of 1995’s Hiroshima, which won the Gemini for best TV movie.

Through the 1980s and ’90s, Spry served as president of Telescene, the Montreal-based production house behind such movies and TV shows as The Lost World, The Hunger and Student Bodies. He was later president of CinéGroupe Images, CinéGroupe’s live-action division.

Speaking to CBC, his sister Lib Spry recalled him doing ‘everything in his power to get work for the people in his community… He was an amazing man. He was a genius, he was very giving.’

More than 400 longtime friends and colleagues attended a memorial service in Montreal, April 2.

Spry leaves behind two children with his ex-wife Carmel Dumas.