Mackey began producing short films as a teenager. Three of these were broadcast on Canadian national television. He produced his first feature film, The Only Thing You Know, in 1971 at the age of 19; it tells the story of a teenage girl's attempts at independence using a documentary shooting style and improvised dialogue. The film won two Canadian Film Awards, including the award for Best Actress, in 1971. It was restored and released on DVD with commentaries and additional material in 2006. Mackey was one of four cinematographers who worked on the 1970 Canadian concert filmFestival Express featuring Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and The Band, that was not released until 2003, 33 years after the original event. Writer Peter Steven called Mackey's 1977 documentary A Right to Live "one of the key moments in the history of committed documentary in Canada." In the 1980s, Mackey directed several episodes of the Emmy Award-winning TV seriesDegrassi Junior High. His second feature, Taking Care, won a Canadian Film and Television Association Award as Best Feature and was nominated for the Best Actress Genie Award in 1988. Target, a project in digital interactive drama which Mackey directed, won him a CINDY Award from the Association of Visual Communicators in Los Angeles in 1989.
Work in vernacular culture
In the early 1980s Mackey worked for six years with children in a nursery school. After this experience, Mackey focused much of his personal work on exploring vernacular culture in many forms. Dance on the Edge, Mackey's third feature, an experimental documentary about a vernacular celebration, premiered at the Figueira da Foz International Film Festival in Portugal in 1996. His documentary website Memory Palace: Vernacular Culture in the Digital Age was nominated for a WebSage Streamers Award and was featured in Forbes magazine. In 2000 Mackey worked without a crew or lights to produce Disrobing the Emperor: The New Commons in Mexico, a profile of three impoverished communities in Mexico. Eyes in the Back of Your Head was made in collaboration with ex-federal inmates in Kingston, Ontario. Mackey's 2010 book Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century documents his decades-long study of vernacular culture and outlines his view of it. The book argues that, in addition to fine art and mass culture, there is a third category of cultural expression: vernacular culture. Examples of this are conversations between friends, social gatherings and rituals, play and participatory sports, informal storytelling, musical jam sessions, cooking and gardening, homemade architecture, and street festivals. Mackey maintains that practising and celebrating these unscripted activities – at the expense of passive, consumer culture – would benefit both people and communities.
