English-born filmmaker Donald McWilliams began film and video making in 1971 in Ontario. Within four years, he had won a Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film Festival for Impressions of China. In 1981, he was asked by world-renowned animator and filmmaker Norman McLaren to come to the National Film Board in Montreal to assist him on what would be McLaren's final film, Narcissus.

This was a pivotal experience, and McWilliams' subsequent work is guided by McLaren's philosophy: that in cinema, the art of movement, how it moves is as important as what moves. This notion was immediately apparent in 1983, in the title sequence War and in the unorthodox rhythms and editing of Aloud/Bagatelle, a performance short in which Canadian poet Earle Birney delivers his sound poem «To Swindon from London by Britrail.»
McWilliams' films became increasingly experimental. His inventive, award-winning Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990) ends with a sequence in which McLaren dances with his own reverse image, demonstrating the abstract beauty and emotion of the 'blurr' technique first explored by McLaren himself and adapted and extended by McWilliams.

In The Passerby, awarded Best Cultural Documentary at the 1997 Hot Docs Festival in Toronto, McWilliams' technical and artistic expertise is applied to a profound and challenging meditation on the 20th century. Evocative sound and picture relationships, the eclectic use of archival, found and home movie footage, animation and the adaptation of animation techniques to live action, and unexpected juxtapositions of subject matter î all this moves McWilliams further towards the creation of a cinema which is beyond the easy answers of the day. The film's success with television audiences confirms McWilliams' belief that artistic experiment should be a mainstream event.

In 1996, McWilliams began a creative partnership with Karen Feiertag on Short, Animated, Canadian, a six-part Gemini-nominated television series produced by the National Film Board of Canada in association with the Bravo! Newstyle Arts Channel.

In 1999, McWilliams was nominated for an Oscar® as producer and editor of Sunrise over Tiananmen Square. In 2003, The National Film Board of Canada released his feature length-documentary collaboration with Feiertag, The Fifth Province, a film essay on exile. Currently McWilliams is working on his most personal film yet, The Sacred Fig Tree, triggered by his own experiences in colonial East Africa.

McWilliams supervised the restoration of all of the film and sound materials for the seven-DVD set Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition released in 2006; and with which he toured in Italy. He also made two archival films in 2006, Raising the Flag & Reflections: Habitat '76, as well as the abstraction Experiment 02_06 in collaboration with animator Alison Loader.

Selected Bibliography:

• Bart Testa, «Searching Artefacts for Answers,» POV Summer/Fall 1997
• Christina Stojanova, «Aller sous la surface des choses,» Cinébulles, vol 22 #1
• Donald McWilliams, «A God in Volda,» Journal of Film Preservation, #69, 2005