Уильям Вейнтрауб: Жизнь и творчество канадского документалиста.

Canadian documentarian/filmmaker, journalist and author (1926 – 2017)

William Weintraub (February 19, 1926 – November 6, 2017) was a Canadian documentarian/filmmaker, journalist and author, best known for his long career with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).

Weintraub was born in Montreal, to Louis Weintraub and Mina Blumer Weintraub, and grew up in the blue collar neighbourhood of Verdun. His father had been a stock broker; he lost everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and worked as the manager of a corner store. William studied English Literature and political science at McGill University, where he had worked on the McGill Daily. In 1947, he took the job of a ski reporter at The Montreal Gazette, from which he was fired for trying to unionize. His time at the Gazette was the basis for his 1961 novel Why Rock the Boat?, which director John Howe turned into a film in 1974.

From 1951 to 1955, Weintraub worked as a copy editor at Weekend Picture Magazine. He became interested in the new medium of television and, in 1955, after taking a two week course in script writing, started freelancing as a writer with the CBC and the NFB. In 1965, he joined the NFB staff and stayed until his retirement in 1987, writing, producing and/or directing 115 documentaries and short films. Productions ranged from Canada: Beef Cattle to historical documentaries to a portrait of Canadian writer Margaret Laurence. His final documentary The Rise and Fall of English Montreal dealt with the second large Quebec diaspora that began in the 1960s and accelerated rapidly after the 1976 Quebec election. From 1975 to 1976, Weintraub was the director, National Film Board studio in Nairobi, Kenya. He served on the international jury of the Kraków Film Festival and was on the board of the Quebec Council for the Diffusion of Cinema. He was a member of the Canadian delegation that visited China's film industry in 1977, a delegate to the UNESCO Conference on Film and Television, and was a recipient of a Canada Council Senior Arts Fellowship. Neither marriage produced children. From an early age, Weintraub suffered from depression. He dealt with it with Psychoanalysis, Electroconvulsive therapy and, eventually, by abstaining from alcohol.