10/28/2026
Film Series continues with RUN TERRY RUN on Sunday November 15 and Sunday November 22 at 4:15PM.
Terry Fox ran 42 kilometres every day for 143 days in 1980 and became a Canadian icon in the process. He is counted among the greatest athletes of all time and, more importantly, forever changed how we think about, support, and fund cancer research. This documentary is the inside story of the Marathon of Hope.
Winnipeg-born and BC-raised Fox was a standout athlete who received a diagnosis of cancer (osteosarcoma) in his right knee shortly before his 19th birthday. His leg was amputated above the knee (he walked with a prosthetic a mere three weeks later!) and he endured sixteen months of chemotherapy. And while he went through this gruelling round of treatment, he formed a plan:
A Marathon of Hope, meant to improve cancer research and give hope to people facing this horrible disease. Fox would run across Canada, fundraising as he went.
On April 12, 1980, Fox put his right leg in the Atlantic Ocean near St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. The next five months saw him battle through a marathon every day, no matter the conditions and no matter the toll it took on his body. By September 2, the day on which Fox announced that his cancer had returned and that he could not keep running, his name was known across Canada and the United States. By April 1981 fundraising efforts reached his goal of $1 per Canadian citizen.
On June 28, 1981 Fox passed away in a British Columbia hospital. The world was forever changed by what Fox did. Cancer research progressed substantially thanks to the Marathon of Hope, and people facing cancer today face it with substantially better treatment options and a higher likelihood of remission than in Fox's time.
This documentary exists because of filmmaker John Simpson, who followed Fox and filmed extensively during the Marathon of Hope. Much of the footage was unused at the time and was given to the Terry Fox Foundation, where it went missing for a time right under the nose of the foundation (according to Terry's brother Darrell). Upon discovery of the footage, Hamilton filmmaker Sean Menard came aboard as director, and he displays a deft touch in allowing the archival footage to tell the story.
In the trailer for RUN TERRY RUN, you'll recognize Terry's distinctive running gait, the support van driven by Doug Alward, the white shirt with the Canadian flag, the grey gym running shorts. This indelible image of one of Canada's true heroes invites us all to reflect on his tenacity, his bravery, and his firm insistence that the real limits are the ones we put on ourselves.
RUN TERRY RUN will make you proud to be Canadian and it may just make you hopeful for the future. Forty-six years since Terry put his foot in the ocean, things are undoubtedly better for those facing cancer. Ask yourself: how much better can things be forty-six years from today, if we take Terry's lessons to heart?
"Menard does an incredible job showing us how extraordinary Terry Fox was in his persistence and selflessness, but also how ordinary he was too"
- Rachel Ho, CBC Radio
"Entertaining, insightful and endearingly fresh, Run Terry Run is a crowd-pleasing triumph of reanimation that adds to the Terry Fox legend in the last remaining way of value: It shows the Canadian legend as a real human being."
- Ben Kaplan, Globe and Mail
"Run Terry Run should be required viewing for all Canadians. Almost 45 years later, Fox’s story remains extraordinary not because the legend has grown larger, but because the person at its centre was so profoundly human."
- Rachel West, That Shelf
