Biography
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(February 2011) |
Achbar is a graduate of Syracuse University's Fine Arts Film Program. He interned in Hollywood on the children's TV programme Bill Daily's Hocus Pocus Gang, followed by a three-year stint in Toronto with Sunrise Films on their documentary series Spread your Wings and the CBC/Disney series Danger Bay . He then teamed up with director Robert Boyd, and received a Gemini nomination for Best Writer on The Canadian Conspiracy , a cultural/political satire for CBC and HBO's Comedy Experiments hosted by Martin Mull, and featuring Canadian-born stars: Eugene Levy, Lorne Greene, Leslie Nelson, William Shatner, Morley Safer, Howie Mandel, Peter Jennings, John Candy, Dave Thomas, Margot Kidder, and Anne Murray. The fake documentary chronicled Canada’s secret takeover of the United States. The program won a Gemini for Best Entertainment Special and was nominated for an International Emmy.
Achbar moved into independent media, working in many capacities on films, videos, and books. With Peter Wintonick, Achbar co-directed and co-produced Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media , which was, until the release of The Corporation Canada's all-time, top-grossing feature documentary. Achbar’s companion book to the film hit the national best-seller list in Canada.
Achbar collaborated with Jennifer Abbott to create Two Brides and a Scalpel: Diary of a Lesbian Marriage, a video diary by the couple who became known as Canada's first legally married same-sex couple. This true story of a transsexual heavy equipment operator who legally married a lesbian woman and then underwent male-to-female sex reassignment surgery, received festival invitations from around the world and was broadcast in Canada on Pridevision and the Knowledge Network.
In 1997, Achbar initiated a documentary film project titled The Corporation with author and University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan. Bakan wrote the film and book, while Achbar co-directed, produced and executive-produced the film, with Jennifer Abbott joining the team as co-director and editor in 2000. The Corporation was released theatrically in 2004 and stands as the all-time, top-grossing feature documentary ever made in Canada. Encore+, a Youtube portal for "classic" Canadian films and TV shows (2017-2022), accumulated over 8,263,108 views of the film, its top-ranked title out of 2,500+ titles. Manufacturing Consent was 2nd ranked, with over 7,380,819 views, and indication of the enduring releavance of the issues the 1992 film explores.
Telefilm, a Canadian film and television financing agency, had a generous reward program for producers of successful theatrical films. Until 2004, those films were exclusively dramas. The Corporation changed that. For the first time, a documentary’s box office gross qualified it for a “performance envelope” – a kind of exclusive reserve fund for the top 15% of producers whose films gross over $1m. A total of $2.38m was awarded to Achbar's company, Invisible Hand Productions Inc, which he invested into ten Canadian feature documentaries: five in development and five in production, which helped lock in $270,000 of development financing and a further $5.85m of production financing for those productions. The completed, theatrically-released productions which benefited from this funding are: Velcrow Ripper's Fierce Light, When Spirit Meets Action; Denis Delestrac's Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space , Kevin McMahon's Waterlife , Frederick Gertten's Bananas: Poison in a Banana Republic; Mathieu Roy's and Harold Crooks' Surviving Progress; and Oliver Hockenhull's Neurons to Nirvana: Understanding Psychedelic Medicine.
In 2022, Achbar helped shoot, and is an EP on DOSED2-The Trip Of A Lifetime
Achbar continues his film career as an executive producer of feature documentary films and the occasional mockumentary. He has contributed his videography skills to two animal rights videos, Penny's Story and Meat The Victims: Excelsior Farms.
Achbar is co-founder, with Sarah Butterfield, of Speakables, a stealthy Vancouver technology startup which designs novel offline speech-to-text devices to assist the deaf and hard of hearing.
