Gaal was born in Budapest, Hungary, on 23 March 1938, and was educated in the Communist system until his departure to Australia at the age of 18.
[5] He worked for the Australian Broadcasting Commission from 1959 to 1969 as an audio technician,[7] and then worked for the Department of Education Victoria from 1970[3] in the Audio-Visual Education Centre (AVEC) film unit, where he stayed for almost 30 years, directing various docu-drama and documentary films.
[9] He has been involved in many organisations over the years, including the Melbourne Filmmakers' Co-Op,[8] the Pram Factory,[8] the Australian Teachers of Media, where he was a judge on the ATOM Awards from 2007-2008,[8] Metro Magazine[10] and the Yarra Ranges Film Society, where he has been a judge (from 2005 to the present) of the "Show Us Your Shorts" program at the Warburton Film Festival.
He took photographs of various musical artists working for Fable Records in the 1970s, including Franciscus Henri [13] and Brian Cadd, and he also took various photos of performers at Melbourne's Pram Factory in the '70s (some of these photos can be found in the Performing Arts Collection at the Arts Centre Melbourne [14]).
18, and a tribute to Ivan Gaal was staged in Melbourne at the Thornbury Picture House.
[3] Recently, his film Applause, Please screened in a special retrospective program at Melbourne Cinematheque in 2017.
[26] After a period of working for the Department of Education promoting school sports with video and photographs in the 1990s, Ivan returned to directing his own films in 2006 with Grey Paddle Power, and then Icing on the Cake in 2009, and A Man From the Other Side in 2015, which was Awarded at the Yarra Ranges Film Festival at Warburton in 2016.
He remained athletically competitive until his later years, winning the World Masters Championship in double Canadian canoe class in 2006 in Edmonton, Canada,[5]