Director Sean Menard knew he had 'something special' when he viewed silent footage of Terry Fox running

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It is fair to think that every part of Terry Fox’s short life has been discussed and chronicled.

Since his 1980, 143-day-long Marathon of Hope has been taught in schools, commemorated in statues and, each year, runs in his name are held around the world. But after encountering Fox’s image while travelling and seeing one of his statues from a stoplight in Ottawa, Toronto filmmaker Sean Menard realized that he did not really know Terry Fox, the man.

“I didn’t know how old he was. I didn’t know the details of his journey. I actually thought he ran across the whole country,” said Menard about Coquitlam’s Fox, who passed away from cancer on June 28, 1981 at age 22.

Unable to find a definitive film that satisfied his curiosity, Menard set out to make one — and discovered an archive that would guide him in the making of the new feature documentary, Run Terry Run.

The film, screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival (Oct. 4, 1:45 p.m. at the Vancouver Playhouse and Oct. 5, 5:30 p.m. at International Village 9) before hitting theatres Oct. 9, uses rediscovered footage and contemporary audio interviews. The result is a very immersive return to 1980 where the realities of the Marathon Of Hope, from rough running conditions, cramped van life, lack of early support and, of course, the punishing physical effort of running an actual marathon a day on a wooden walking prosthesis, are laid bare.

Menard’s research led him to the Fox family, who had five digitized reels labelled five through nine. The numbering suggested four missing reels. Menard went looking for them.

What he found was a lot bigger. More than 90 reels were discovered housed in a storage facility just “five streetlights” from Menard’s Toronto home. One of the first reels Menard watched was silent footage of Fox running uphill for three uninterrupted minutes.

“I get goosebumps even thinking about that,” said Menard. “Seeing the effort, it takes on every stride, and seeing the cars whip by him because, at that time, they didn’t know who he was, and in that moment, I knew that this was something special.”

Once he decided this was a story he wanted to tell, Menard had to convince those close to Fox to talk with him.

“What’s interesting is, when I sat them down, the very first question all of them asked was, ‘Why is this different than any other Terry Fox movie?’ Because they had been involved in countless productions,” said Menard. “I had my laptop and I showed them just raw footage. It was maybe five minutes of just Terry running in Toronto.”

Their doubts soon fell away.

“Oh wow, I’ve never seen this before,” they told Menard.

His answer was blunt: “No one has. … I think, right then, they realized that this is probably going to be unique.”

Fox began the Marathon Of Hope in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on April 12, 1980. He ran more than 5,000 kilometres before the return of cancer forced him to stop on Sept. 1, 1980, near Thunder Bay, Ont.

With the Terry Fox Foundation now having raised $1 billion for cancer research, it is hard to imagine that Fox began his run far under the radar. Menard said he assumed the Marathon Of Hope was a well-financed, well-oiled operation, whose hero was celebrated at every stop.

That wasn’t the case, as the early East Coast footage shows a shy 21-year-old Fox who repeatedly had to explain what he was doing and why. His trip through Quebec is beyond disheartening. But then PR man Bill Vigars joined the group and put a publicity plan in motion that led to a much different vibe. Vigars, who passed away in 2024, wrote the 2023 book Terry & Me: The Inside Story of Terry Fox’s Marathon Of Hope.

“As he crosses into Ontario, he gets a hero’s welcome with a local band, and people are coming out to see him, and there’s balloons and everything,” said Menard. “That shows the power of marketing and how much that impacted Terry’s Marathon Of Hope.”

Fox quickly became a national hero, and his goal of raising $1 million was soon surpassed. When the Marathon Of Hope ended, it had accumulated just over $24 million in donations.

To maintain the period’s feel in the film, Menard keeps the interview subjects off camera. Their voices — including those of Fox’s brother Darrell, friend Doug Alward and journalist Leslie Scrivener — accompany the remarkable archival material. Scrivener, who was a very young Toronto Star reporter when she was assigned to follow and write about Fox’s journey, reads from Fox’s journals — a choice Menard felt was fitting because of the trust between the reporter and her subject.

“My hope is that it becomes personal,” said Menard about the immediacy of his filmmaking. “What I was trying to do was create a time machine and give the experience of what it would be like if you were standing on the side of the road, and you got to see Terry run by you.”

He has succeeded. The film, which sees proceeds go toward the Terry Fox Foundation and cancer research, offers all the feels. And it offers a boost in Canadian pride as you watch a shy young man under intense attention, rise to a huge challenge and become a hero in front of our eyes.

But not just any kind of hero. Fox is a particularly Canadian kind of hero — humble, stubborn and hopeful. His story, revisited in this emotional and immersive film, brings people together across divisions. One thing we can all agree on is that Terry Fox is someone we all can be very proud of.

“It’s a great representation of what it means to be Canadian and how we choose our heroes,” said Menard. “He exemplifies everything of what you love to see in a Canadian.”