Nearly 30 years ago, a young Canadian filmmaker named Don Shebib took $19,000 of government funding from the Canadian Film Development Corporation, sold his prized Morgan sports car and went off and made a film.

When four months later he emerged from the cutting room, Shebib held in his hands a kind of holy grail produced with a budget of $26,000.

Countless Canadian filmmakers, bureaucrats and policy makers past and present have sought the secret of what Shebib had then. Namely, the ability to create an entertaining film that tells a distinctively Canadian story while achieving box-office and critical success on both the domestic and international scene.

Most have failed.

The film was of course Goin’ Down The Road, Shebib’s rough yet moving debut feature about a pair of Maritime migrants seeking their fortune in Toronto.

Restored by Moviepix and the National Archives, new prints of Goin’ Down the Road will be released across the country by the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s The Film Circuit beginning Jan. 22.

Written by William Fruet and shot cinema verite style by cinematographer Richard Leiterman, Shebib’s 1970 film tells a truly Canadian tale brimming with sympathy and compassion about the dreams and hopes of a pair of ‘born losers.’

Considering its highly indigenous subject matter, Goin’ Down The Road’s success must appear sublime to the industry players and policy wonks trying to hammer out initiatives for Canada’s struggling feature films.

But today, on the occasion of the film’s rerelease, Shebib contends that the reasons for the film’s success are quite simple.

‘It’s a goodhearted film, people liked the characters and it was an interesting story, although I think the plot was kind of weak,’ he says modestly.

Weak plot aside, Goin’ Down The Road played at the New Yorker Theatre in Toronto for six months and in New York and Boston for four-month runs on the strength of glowing reviews in the New York Times and Variety.

With a strong resemblance to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Shebib says Goin’ Down The Road’s plot was the Canadian version of the country mouse coming to the city. ‘It was a universal story put in a Canadian setting,’ he says.

But it wasn’t the film’s distinctively Canadian setting that made it appealing, says Shebib, it was the fact that it was a kind of film that still rarely gets made in Canada.

‘I don’t think it’s a question of being truly Canadian, I think it’s a question of being entertaining,’ he says.

‘We haven’t made enough Canadian entertainment movies. Hopefully that is now changing. We’ve been able to do that in television. We’ve made entertaining Canadian television programs, yet it seems to have stopped there. We haven’t seemed to have made many entertaining films, over the last 15 years in particular.’

Shebib himself has been part of the improvement in Canadian television, directing episodes for a myriad of Canadian productions. He has directed a number of features as well, including Heartaches in 1980 and later the well-received Change of Heart. But none have captured the box-office success or critical acclaim of Goin’ Down The Road.

The fact that most look back on the film as a watershed moment in English-Canadian cinema speaks volumes about the kinds of movies that are being financed by both the public and private sector, says Shebib.

‘I think it should have been long forgotten and surpassed,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately it hasn’t been that often.’

Shebib points to the current independent release Waking Ned Devine as an example of the type of film he thinks Canadian filmmakers should strive to produce.

‘I care about films that are entertaining. Do they have an understanding of plot and structure? Do they move an audience and make them or laugh or cry?’ he asks.

The director currently has a number of feature projects in development, but he’s keeping the details to himself. Now in his late fifties and still obsessed with telling good stories, perhaps Shebib will once again show us how to solve the riddle of Canadian film.