Canadian filmmaker Ron Kelly provoked the Establishment with his movies

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Filmmaker Ron Kelly, who has died at 96, first worked at CBC Television in the 1950s and shot his last documentary in 2004, half a century later. In between those years, he wrote, produced and directed films in Britain and the United States before returning to Canada and working for the National Film Board and the CBC.

“Ron Kelly was part of an incredibly rich cultural moment for television in Canada where the CBC [was] creating programs, both drama and documentary, that were really innovative, as well as pushing the envelope in terms of addressing contemporary topics,” said Andrew Burke, a professor at the University of Winnipeg who specializes in the history of film and television in Canada.

“Ron directed the very first episode of Wojeck (1966), a prime-time serial drama about a coroner,” he said. “That first episode that Ron directed, which won a number of awards at that year’s Canada Screen Awards, took on the question of Indigenous people moving to the city.”

Mr. Kelly’s films won many awards in Canada and in Europe. His film The Megantic Outlaw (1971), a historical drama about a Robin Hood-like character in Quebec’s Eastern Townships in the late 19^th century, won two Canadian Film Awards: Best TV Drama and Best Actress (Non-Feature). The following year, Springhill (1972), his docudrama about the 1958 coal mining disaster in Nova Scotia, won two more Canadian Film Awards, and Mr. Kelly received an ACTRA nomination for best dramatic writer.

Both films also received favourable reviews. “It is a warm feeling to see a show that is so essentially Canadian,” Globe and Mail critic Blaik Kirby wrote about The Megantic Outlaw. “Remember the bad old days when we felt we had to pretend to be U.S. citizens to produce anything that had international potential.”

Mr. Kelly directed several documentaries for the CBC Television series Telescope.

“The CBC was so good at these in the early 1960s,” said Prof. Burke, the film historian. “Ron made a documentary on bullfighting in Mexico, one on jazz and another called Station 51, [after] a police station in Toronto. It was a kind of cinéma vérité, fly-on-the-wall documentary.”

One of his films for Telescope in 1966 involved Alanis Obomsawin, who at the time was an Abenaki activist working to get a swimming pool built for the children in her community near Trois-Rivières.

“Ron made a short documentary about that and Alanis was incredibly charismatic on screen, and the people at the NFB saw that documentary on the CBC and invited her to come to the NFB for an interview,” Prof. Burke said. “Her long career was triggered by this documentary that Ron made of her.”

Ms. Obomsawin went on to become a major force in Canadian filmmaking.

Ronald Arthur Kelly was born on June 11, 1929, in Vancouver and grew up in a comfortable household in West Vancouver, complete with a dock and a sailboat or two. His father, Robinson Kelly, built a prosperous trucking business. His mother, the former Anita Berger, was a homemaker.

After high school, Ron enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of British Columbia. But he was injured in a rugby accident and spent a long spell in hospital, which put him off being a doctor.

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“He hated being around sick people,” his son Max Kelly said. “He embarked on a career in the arts, first as a painter, and then [went] into film and TV.”

Mr. Kelly began at CBC Television in Vancouver in 1956, in a kind of apprenticeship with the broadcaster’s film unit. In 1959, he received a fellowship from the Canadian Arts Council (now the Canada Council for the Arts) to study film production at Pinewood Studios, in Britain.

While he was in England, he made a controversial film called The Tearaways about the motorcycle culture in Britain in the early 60s. Although rather mild by today’s standards, it was criticized by British politicians.

The Tearaways won an award at the Cannes Television Festival in 1962, when Mr. Kelly was 32. At the time, there was a television festival and a film festival at Cannes, and The Tearaways won on the television side.

“It was banned until it got a prize at the Cannes festival and they had to show it because it got so much publicity in Europe. They were embarrassed into showing it on the BBC,” Mr. Kelly said in a 1965 interview.

In 1964, he directed The Open Grave, for the CBC documentary series Horizon. It won the Prix Italia in Genoa. Broadcast on Easter weekend, the film was a modern interpretation of Christ’s Resurrection. It was set in a Toronto cemetery where the body of a peace movement leader disappears, leaving behind an open grave. Although the film won a prestigious prize in Italy, British politicians wanted it banned from the BBC.

Reginald Bevins, the postmaster in the Tory government, wanted to block the film from being broadcast even though he had not seen it. The publicity was good for Mr. Kelly’s reputation. The Montreal Gazette on April 2, 1964, reported “Viewers liked CBC’s Open Grave. … Brilliance they tried to ban.”

When it finally appeared on the BBC, it was praised in Britain.

“The controversial Canadian film, The Open Grave, whose showing on BBC television last night the postmaster-general had been asked to ban, was a brilliantly naturalistic piece of work. Provocative certainly in its thinking in terms of a contemporary problem. It did not strike me as in any way offensive because of it being an allegory on the passion and death of Christ,” Roy Wilson wrote in a British newspaper.

As an aside, Mr. Kelly was known in Britain not only as a filmmaker but also as the brother of Barbara Kelly, a famous actor who was married to Bernard Braden. A British paper described the couple as “a well-known Canadian team on British TV.”

TV critic Peter Black lampooned the British politicians for attempting to keep the film off the air. “What kind of unfermented dough serves them for brains,” he wrote.

Ron Kelly was surprised at the influence his films had, in particular The Open Grave, which he didn’t particularly like.

“Someone told me they read somewhere that The Open Grave has been seen by 25 million people here and in Europe. I find this absolutely staggering and frightening in a strange way to think that if one has seen the slightest influence over anybody who’ve seen this film multiplied by 25 million,” Mr. Kelly said.

He then recounted how a stranger told him a film Mr. Kelly made on Spain had changed the man’s life. “He said `I saw a film you made in Spain and I immediately went off and bought a one-way ticket to Spain and the longest visa I could get.’ So, this is terribly disturbing in a way and gratifying in another.”

Apart from Mr. Kelly’s film work, he was an adventurer; he sailed across the Atlantic and was a crew on the gruelling Fastnet sailing race around the British Isles.

He and his second wife, Sondra Kelly (née Zuckerman), travelled around Europe and North Africa. At one stage they bought a boat and retraced Ulysses’s route in the Odyssey sailing all through the Greek islands and Turkey and down to Tunisia. When Sondra became pregnant, they sailed through the canals of France and then moved back to Toronto.

Mr. Kelly was married twice and had four children. His first marriage was to Cynthia von Rhau. His longer marriage was his second, to Sondra, an accomplished screenwriter who was active with the Writers Guild of Canada.

“He retired from filmmaking around the time I was born and he continued to work as a painter, which he had done his whole life,” said Max Kelly, his son from his second marriage. “My mother was the breadwinner, working in television and film as well. He eventually became a silversmith, first dealing in antique silver and then he began making fancy sterling silver cups.”

Robinson Kelly, a son from another relationship, said he recalled his father saying he had grown disillusioned with the world of filmmaking. “He said the art had gone out of it and it was too centred on making money.”

Ron Kelly returned to filmmaking in 2004 for one last film, Victims of Victims, a documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was a personal project that was never shown publicly.

After Sondra died in 2008, Mr. Kelly sold his house in Toronto and moved to rural Ontario. He died on April 25 in Peterborough, Ont. He leaves his children, Caitlin Kelly, Robinson Kelly, Alexandrea Kelly and Max Kelly, and two grandchildren.

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