80 minutes – Drama
Festival release: August 13, 1964 (Montreal World Film Festival)
Release date: November, 1964
US release date: April 21, 1965 (New York)
Subtitled release: July 23, 1965 as Départ sans adieux
Distributor: Columbia Pictures

Peter (Kastner), an eighteen-year-old who lives with his parents and sister in a middle-class Toronto suburban wasteland in the early 1960s, is a rebel without a cause or a clue. He argues with his parents, skips school, makes his girlfriend pregnant (she leaves him), and is exploited by a hostile adult world when he leaves home. He finally runs away with stolen money and a stolen car. The film’s mundane storyline is overcome by beautiful performances and the purity of its intentions. Originally slated as a half-hour docudrama on juvenile delinquency for the Unit B of the NFB, the feature film was shot in three weeks in Toronto and went on to win critical acclaim in New York, and subsequently in Canada, and remains a seminal – if flawed – film in the development of early English-Canadian cinema.

The poster for Nobody Waved Good-bye was scanned from an original in the Northernstars Collection.