Nik Sheehan

Nik Sheehan is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, who established an international reputation with No Sad Songs (1985), the first major documentary on AIDS. The film cited by world-renowned specialist Dr. Balfour Mount as “the best film on the planet this year”.

In 1995 he produced and directed Symposium, inspired by Plato’s classic and featuring multiple views of gay love as performed by Canadian artists and writers including Brad Fraser, Stan Persky, Patricia Rozema, Tomson Highway, Daniel MacIvor and others. Premiering at the Montréal Film Festival, it was broadcast extensively by the CBC, and created national headlines.

God’s Fool (1997), shot in Morocco, tells the story of Scott Symons, a renegade writer of the Canadian establishment who had exiled himself to the seaside town of Essaouira. It premiered at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, where artistic director Greg Gatenby judged it “the best film biography of a writer I have ever seen”. God’s Fool was broadcast nationally in prime time on Bravo TV. In 2002 the film opened “Freedom to Read Week” on the BookTelevision digital channel, where it remains in rotation. Following Symons' death in February 2009, Sheehan wrote and published an obituary in Xtra![1]

Sheehan has worked as a literary critic, essayist, and biographer, publishing in Montage, POV, the National Post, Now, Toronto Life, Quill & Quire, Masthead and fab.