Michael Rubbo
2021Journal inachevé
Marilú Mallet
Nicolas Rubbo, Isabel Allende
In this heartwarming docudrama, Chilean immigrant Marilú Mallet strives to make a film about her experience of deep isolation. Her English-speaking husband, a prominent film director, criticizes her subjective approach to filmmaking; her young son, raised in Quebec, speaks only French. Interviews with Isabel Allende and other Chilean exiles reveal a deep bond in this powerful and resonant film about language and genre, exile and immigration.
Unfinished Diary
Wet Earth and Warm People
Michael Rubbo
This documentary by Michael Rubbo (Waiting for Fidel) offers candid glimpses of Indonesia and its people. Filming in and around the capital of Jakarta, the cameras follow where chance leads, capturing the flavour of life in this fertile crescent of tropical islands. Throughout the film, the focus is on a society caught between the past and the conflicting options for the future - to change or not to change from long-established patterns of life to ones more influenced by western technology.
Wet Earth and Warm People
Sad Song of Yellow Skin
Michael Rubbo
Michael Rubbo, Richard Hughes
A film about the people of Saigon told through the experiences of three young American journalists who, in 1970, explored the consequences of war and of the American presence in Vietnam. It is not a film about the Vietnam War, but about the people who lived on the fringe of battle. The views of the city are arresting, but away from the shrines and the open-air markets lies another city, swollen with refugees and war orphans, where every inch of habitable space is coveted. (NFB)
Sad Song of Yellow Skin
Daisy: The Story of a Facelift
Michael Rubbo
Middle-aged NFB producer Daisy Bellefeuille is about to get a facelift. Rubbo follows the process through her discussions with her friends, consultations with physicians, observation of other facelift patients, and finally the operation and its aftermath. There's also an amateur-intellectual sidebar on the history of physical appearance and its cultural importance- Altogether, a gripping, hour-long documentary about a woman and her facelift.
Daisy: The Story of a Facelift
Waiting for Fidel
Michael Rubbo
Geoff Stirling, Fidel Castro
This feature-length documentary from 1974 takes viewers inside Fidel Castro's Cuba. A movie-making threesome hope that Fidel himself will star in their film. The unusual crew consists of former Newfoundland premier Joseph Smallwood, radio and TV owner Geoff Stirling and NFB film director Michael Rubbo. What happens while the crew awaits its star shows a good deal of the new Cuba, and also of the three Canadians who chose to film the island. (NFB)
Waiting for Fidel
Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller
Michael Rubbo
Anthony Rogers, Lucas Evans
When the joker Tommy Tricker plays some practical jokes on some of his friends, his best friend Ralph, a stamp collector, discovers the secret of "stamp travel" to make him travel around the world on a stamp to bring back the mysterious Charles Merriweather, who never returned on a stamp for 75 years.
Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller
Vincent et moi
Michael Rubbo
Tchéky Karyo, Nina Petronzio
While sketching one day, 13 year old Jo encounters a mysterious art dealer who buys a few of her drawings and commissions her to do some more. Some time thereafter she reads a news story about a million dollar sale of some drawings of a young Vincent Van Gogh. She enlists the aid of some friends and heads to Amsterdam in search of the mystery man. Or, should she go to 19th century Arles in search of Vincent himself?
Vincent and me
Margaret Atwood: Once in August
Michael Rubbo
Margaret Atwood, Michael Rubbo
In Margaret Atwood: Once in August, filmmaker Michael Rubbo attempts to discover what shapes the celebrated writer's fiction and what motivates her characters. As one of Canada's most distinguished poets and novelists, Atwood is also one of this country's most elusive literary figures.
Margaret Atwood: Once in August
The Peanut Butter Solution
Michael Rubbo
Mathew Mackay, Helen Hughes
Peanut butter is the secret ingredient for magic potions made by two friendly ghosts. Eleven-year-old Michael loses all of his hair when he gets a fright and uses the potion to get his hair back, but too much peanut butter causes things to get a bit hairy.
The Peanut Butter Solution
The Return of Tommy Tricker
Michael Rubbo
Michael Stevens, Joshawa Mathers
Welcome to the world of stamps with Tommy Tricker and friends as they learn the magic of travelling through time and space for the mere price of the postage. Though of course, nothing is as easy as it seems as they soon learn when they try to rescue Charles Merriweather, a stamp traveller frozen in time since his last attempt at stamp- travelling, 65 years ago. But Charles turns out to be a girl, his sister Molly! And she is rapidly turning into an old woman. To find a cure, Tommy takes off in a race against the time that leads him and Molly to the exotic and magical South Pacific islands.
Le retour des aventuriers du timbre perdu
