In January 1957, the CBC broadcast a tough, short documentary set in the dives and flophouses of Downtown Eastside Vancouver. Strikingly shot in black and white with moving scenes of drunks fighting in alleyways and panhandlers begging passers-by for change, it depicted the lives of downtrodden members of Canadian society. That film was Skidrow, and it retains the capacity to shock and touch a viewer. It also marked the debut of Allan King, one of Canada's finest filmmakers.

Five decades later, King is finally getting his due as a creator of fine dramatic films and TV productions, and, more importantly, as this country's leading exponent of cinema vérité, which he has memorably termed "actuality drama."

The bearded, bespectacled director, still vigorous at 76, has in recent years received lifetime achievement awards from Hot Docs and the Directors Guild of Canada, a Toronto Arts Award, an Honorary Doctorate from Simon Fraser University, and the Order of Canada. A major advocate for Canada's cultural industries, King also served as DGC president in 1970-71 and again from 1993 to 2000.

It's hard to believe that King was once disparaged by Cinema Canada's Michael Dorland as the "sinister documentarian of the future" after Who's in Charge?, his 1983 documentary about unemployment, was denounced in Parliament after airing on CBC. Or that the distinguished Robert Flaherty Film Seminar was reduced to appalled silence after his vérité feature Come On Children (1973) had its unfortunate premiere there.

"It was as if I'd shat on the floor," recalls King, with some satisfaction, of the seminar's reception to his film on Toronto kids who espoused hippie values but accomplished nothing when given a farmhouse and months to be creative.

King's career is remarkable not just for its longevity and highlights, but also for the number of times he could have simply given up. It's a measure of his fortitude and, he admits, "good genes," that King was eager and able to tackle such difficult topics as death and dementia in, respectively, his recent comeback triumphs Dying at Grace (2003) and Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company (2005).

"None of this would be happening now," laughs King, commenting on his recent, and highly deserved, tributes, "if it weren't for Rudy Buttignol [then head of network programming at TVO], who brought me back to documentaries after so many years."

King has often reinvented his career, having lived in Vancouver, Spain, England, Toronto, and now Saskatchewan, while working in diverse genres: feature dramas, episodic TV, MOWs, short and feature documentaries and experimental productions incorporating both fact and fiction. Through it all, he has garnered numerous accolades.

Even his more commercial period saw him pick up a number of prizes. In 1978, One Night Stand, his MOW adaptation of playwright Carol Bolt's mature exploration of modern sexuality, garnered four Canadian Film Awards. Ready for Slaughter (1983), about farmers trying to save their farms from foreclosure, won the Banff Festival's best TV drama trophy, while the director took home a 1993 Gemini Award for an episode of Road to Avonlea.