English-born filmmaker Donald McWilliams commenced his third and best chosen career in 1971 when he began making experimental film and video in Ontario. Within four years, he had won a Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film Festival for his film IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA. In 1981, he was asked by world-renowned animator and filmmaker Norman McLaren to come to the National Film Board in Montrèal to assist him on what would be McLaren's final film, NARCISSUS. Since then, McWilliams' own films have won prizes in Canada, the United States and Europe, and have been invited to more than 50 of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. McWilliams' work continues to be guided by McLaren's filmmaking philosophy. McWilliams believes that in cinema, the art of movement, how it moves is as important as what moves. This notion has informed the conscious and subtle experimentation in such works as the DEFENCE OF CANADA and WAR title sequences, as well as the unorthodox rhythms and editing of ALOUD / BAGATELLE (1983), a performance short in which Canadian poet Earle Birney delivers his sound poem "To Swindon from London by Britrail". McWilliams' films become increasingly experimental. An example is his inventive, award-winning film study CREATIVE PROCESS: NORMAN McLAREN (1990) which 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 of twenty-five years is again applied -- this time to a profound and challenging meditation on the Twentieth Century. Evocative sound and picture relationships, the eclectic use of archival, found and home movie footage, the use of etch-on-film and visual abstraction, the adaptation of animation techniques to live action, and the challenging juxtapositions of subject matter -- 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 television series produced by the National Film Board of Canada in association with the Bravo! Newstyle Arts Channel. The television and festival success of the series (Gemini nomination 1998) was the first step in the development of SCRAP FILM, an independent production company launched in late 1997. In 1999, McWilliams was nominated for an Oscar® as producer and editor of SUNRISE OVER TIANANMEN SQUARE and is currently hard at work on THE EXILE, a feature-length documentary which was shot in Canada, France and Africa. McWilliams intends that this film will be his most experimental yet; and he is making extensive use of computer graphics. In 2000, he directed and edited a seven-minute DVD loop "McLaren!! "for the Canada and the World Museum in Ottawa, Canada. He is also producing a new Scrap project, LETTERS FROM THE FIRST WORLD.  Nominated for Achievement in Documentary Short Subjects 1998: SUNRISE OVER TIANANMEN SQUARE - Producer (w. Shui-Bo Wang) 1 nomination