Richard Charles Bocking (1931- )

Richard Charles Bocking (born March 21, 1931) is an award-winning filmmaker whose documentaries on the environment and the performing arts have aired on Canadian and European network television for the past twenty-five years.

Born in Port Arthur, Ontario (now Thunder Bay, Ontario), Ontario, Bocking graduated from the University of Manitoba as an agricultural economist and was employed in that field by the Alberta government. His work then took him into broadcasting when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) invited him to help produce farm-related programs for radio and television. His broadcasting interests developed to include performing arts and environmental and resource issues.

He was transferred to Vancouver to take on the role of television producer. He has since produced over 60 films. Some of those feature documentaries, produced in Canada and abroad, include: The Music of Man (1979), Vivaldi (1986), which was filmed in Venice and Montreal and awarded the Prix Anik, for best music program on CBC television in 1987, Jon Vickers: A Man and His Music (1975), Canada To-morrow (1973), showcasing the development policies of Canada, and perhaps most notably, Canada's Water: ­For Sale? (1972), which studied the issue of exporting Canada's water to the United States. Canada's Water: For Sale was also a novel published in 1972. Mr Bocking has generously donated copies of his documentary films to the university, which are available to students and faculty through the Audio Visual department.

In 1997, Mr Bocking published Mighty River: A Portrait Of The Fraser, for which he won the Roderick Haig-Brown Prize, in addition to being nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1998. In 2001, he was made the Trent University Ashley Fellow for 2001/2002.

He has lived and worked in Edmonton, Vancouver, Quebec City, Rome, Toronto, and Montreal. He and his wife Winnifred now live in Victoria, British Columbia.