Canada Unscripted: Conversations With Canadian Media Icons - Softcover

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Vic Sarin, born in Kashmir, India, is a renowned Canadian filmmaker celebrated as a director, cinematographer, and screenwriter. Moving to Canada in 1963, he began a long career with CBC Television before establishing his own company, Sepia Films. His cinematography credits include Margaret's Museum, Whale Music, Nowhere to Hide, Norman's Awesome Experience, and Riel. As a director, his fiction films include Cold Comfort, Partition, Left Behind, Shine of Rainbows, and Cry From the Sea. His award-winning documentaries include Hue, The Boy from Geita, and Keepers of the Magic. Among his accolades are the Directors Guild of Canada Lifetime Achievement Award and appointment to the Order of Canada in 2022. He is the author of Eyepiece: Adventures in Canadian Film and Television and the audiobook Gung Ho Filmmaking.

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CANADA UNSCRIPTED brings together 21 remarkable voices from across the country's broadcasting and filmmaking world. In these intimate and often surprising interviews, celebrated actors, journalists, directors, and producers share stories that are raw, funny, and deeply revealing. At the heart of the book are the CBC and the National Film Board: two institutions that helped shape Canada's cultural identity. These conversations offer behind-the-scenes insight into landmark productions, pivotal news moments, and the personal journeys that shaped a generation of storytellers. With reflections that range from the political to the poetic, this is a book for readers who care about media, memory, and the power of creativity. The interviews were conducted by Vic Sarin, one of Canada's most acclaimed filmmakers, whose career has spanned continents, genres, and generations. With warmth and insight, Vic draws out the essence of each storyteller.

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Excerpt from Brian Stewart Interview

VIC: But did you ever struggle with the role of journalist versus witness?

BRIAN: Absolutely. I mean, I’ve done a few things that felt helpful, but there was always guilt. I’d be standing there with my camera, then going back to my hotel. What am I really doing? Am I just a voyeur? I remember Bangladesh during the famine. I didn’t go on assignment, I went on my own—I wanted to understand what starvation felt like. I found a family I could shadow, try to grasp what they were living through. But by the end of the first day, I couldn’t do it. The guilt was overwhelming. I could go back to my Hilton. Was I just exploiting this? The emotional weight became stronger as the years went on.

Eventually, that helplessness evolved into what I now know as?moral injury. It stayed with me. I’d think back to families we passed by the side of the road—people who had to walk for two days to reach help. And I’d wonder: couldn’t we have put a few people in our van? We always had a few U.S. bills in our pockets. Couldn’t we have done more? But then the questions haunt you—am I playing God, choosing one family over another? That line of thinking sticks with you. Sometimes it hits harder?years later?than in the moment. I still think about what we could have done for those people.

VIC: Any particular story you’d want to share from that time?

BRIAN: Well, maybe I’ll come back to that, but just to cover how I got into television—originally, I was in print. My first love. I worked for the?Montreal Gazette in the ’60s—an incredible time for journalism. The Expo year, Centennial, 1967. I’d just come back from two years working in London in print. Joined the Gazette, and it was fantastic—nightlife, politics, culture. I wasn’t married, life was fabulous. I was the first reporter, I believe, to use the term “Trudeaumania” in a news story. Then came the FLQ, the October Crisis—all of it unfolding around us.

Near the end of the ’60s, I was offered a chance to work in?local TV. It was never in my plan. I figured I’d try it for a year—see what it was like—and I stayed. That was around ’69. I joined a show in Montreal called “Hourglass” as a studio host. Then, in ’73, I became the CBC’s first investigative reporter on television, based in Ottawa. I spent about six or seven years doing investigations and foreign affairs reporting, and that led to my first overseas assignments. Eventually, I was posted to London.

But through it all, I still felt like a?newspaper man working in TV, not the other way around. And I think that newspaper discipline—structuring stories, writing clearly—it served me well. Even so, I knew nothing about television at first. I was terrible. But later, based in London with my producer, Tony Berman, we caught wind of a?famine?in Ethiopia.

This was 1984. We’d already come through Beirut and other war zones that had left their mark. But in ’84, we were one of the first crews, along with the BBC, to get into?northern Ethiopia, into Tigray—ground zero of the famine. On November 1st, 1984, we aired our story. And I think it shook Canada. The response was unprecedented—an outpouring of compassion, support, donations. But for me, it was just the beginning of a series of devastating assignments. I returned to Ethiopia several times, also to Sudan, where we covered child slavery, refugee crises—it just kept getting darker.

I don’t want to sound dramatic, but at times it felt like descending into a?vortex of horrors. Each story pulled us deeper—across barren, drought-stricken lands, into camps filled with tens of thousands of people slowly dying. It felt like the aftermath of a nuclear war. And we were just trying to make sense of it, document it—witness it.

I remember a couple of times people said to me, “We know you Canadians are just Americans in disguise. You come in here trying to act all special, like the Swiss or something. But we know what you are.” That really got my heart pounding, because I knew what that kind of suspicion could lead to. It became something I worried about. But aside from a few tense moments, I didn’t encounter much suspicion. During the Cold War, when I went to East Germany or Poland for CBC, we were just seen as another NATO member. We got the same level of scrutiny as the rest—watched carefully, but nothing out of the ordinary.

VIC: And didn’t North Korea at one point use maple leaf insignias to confuse the enemy?

BRIAN: Yes, exactly! They’d put maple leaves on their equipment—trying to pass as Canadian peacekeepers. There was so much confusion about who was who, and so we always tried to be very clear: “We’re not Americans.” We leaned into Canada’s reputation for neutrality. It helped us feel more human, less politically threatening.

Looking back, that was one of our strengths. Being from Canada gave us confidence. We knew that most places we went, we’d be met with goodwill. People were usually helpful. Rarely did we find real animosity toward Canada. There were exceptions, of course—like South Africa. During the Mulroney years, with his vocal opposition to apartheid and support for Mandela, there was definitely suspicion from some white South Africans. They saw Canada as playing a mischief-making role. But that was rare.

Most of the time, I felt this strong sense of:?we’re the good guys in the story. We’re Canadian television. We’re not exactly peacekeepers, but we’re close. CBC News had this reputation—calm, neutral, peace-loving. That gave us a moral footing. And then there was the freedom we had. The CBC gave us extraordinary independence. Other journalists would say to us over drinks, “You guys are so lucky.” Their networks needed to know their exact location every hour of the day. We could vanish for two or three days to chase a story.

VIC: You could write what you wanted?

BRIAN: Exactly. We’d decide what the real story was. We’d talk it through with head office, but they trusted us. They believed we were capable. And that kind of trust fuels you. It makes you want to do your very best. We’d say to ourselves, “We can’t let them down.” The last thing we wanted was to send home something weak—something subpar. The standards back home were high. You felt them behind you. And I think that’s why we worked so hard. You didn’t want to disappoint the team that believed in you.

BRIAN: I remember being on a trip with Bill Cunningham. We’d be sitting in a bar and I’d feel this guilt—like, “They brought me here. They’re backing me. I’d better find something worthwhile.” So I’d go back out and chase more leads, even when I was dead tired. It’s a kind of reverse psychology. They didn’t pressure us directly. They didn’t micromanage. But precisely because they didn’t, we pushed ourselves harder.

VIC: Because they believed in you.

BRIAN: Exactly. That belief made you anxious—not in a bad way, but in a way that kept you striving. The worst feeling would be to return with nothing. Nothing strong. Nothing original. You wanted to prove that CBC had made the right choice in sending you.

There was something else: a real?pride of nationality. We didn’t talk about it often, but we felt it. In the ’80s, we felt like Canadian television news was entering a golden age. We were competing with the BBC, with the...