Pioneering filmmaker Peter Pearson was ‘a natural disrupter’

Peter Pearson was part of the first wave of film directors who in the 1960s and 70s, started to create a distinctive national imagery and a voice for anglophone Canada. He had absorbed the lessons of post-war Italian neo-realism while a film student in Rome, and preferred to make films about characters who were poor and marginalized but remained stubbornly themselves. A prolific writer and director of dramas and documentaries for television, he also lobbied tirelessly for more Canadian content and support for our film and television industries.