The five nominated filmmakers for the Donald Brittain Award for best documentary are all veterans of the business. All, except David Kaufman of cbc’s in-house investigative program the fifth estate, are independent filmmakers and together they’ve racked up more years of experience than the 50-odd years in the life of the great Canadian icon of documentary, the National Film Board.

Although changes are looming, the existence of three main broadcast supports – cbc/Radio-Canada, CBC Newsworld and tvontario – plus provincial and federal government funding agencies and the nfb, have made Canada not only home to a great documentary tradition, but a haven for making non-fiction films.

True, there are lots of opportunities, but it’s not all paradise. Once labeled the ‘d’ word, the genre might well be tagged for the difficulties, deficits, deadlines and the delightful or deadly surprises that are all part of getting these projects off the ground and on the air.

Ric Bienstock is nominated for Ms. Conceptions, the film she directed and coproduced with Linda Frum about the plight of single motherhood. The idea started with a personal conversation between the two women, expanded into an investigation into this recent and increasingly popular phenomenon, and developed into a film for cbc’s Witness about the larger scheme of how men and women are (or are not) interacting with one another in western society today.

One of the greatest challenges the two filmmakers faced was finding the right women to speak about the issue, something that required development funding while they scoured Canada, investigated some activist groups in California and New York, and made a few contacts in the u.k.

For Bienstock, the desire to shoot on film and the decision to research and shoot both at home and abroad meant the $440,000 project needed some extra cash in addition to the cbc licence fee of $100,000. Dennis Murphy, then nfb Ontario Centre director, came onside for cash and lab services and Bienstock sought presales.

With international sales high on any documentary filmmaker’s list of priorities, Bienstock says she was asked if they chose to shoot elsewhere (in addition to Canada) for the sake of attracting distributors. ‘No, but we looked at the subject matter as an international topic. The more universal the story, the better it will sell.’

Plus ‘We found countries like Japan, where women wouldn’t have kids on their own, are interested in the film,’ says Bienstock. ‘I think it’s more, `Look at those crazy Westerners.’ That’s my guess and my distributor (George Matta of Mundovision) confirms it.’ So far, the film has sold to 18 territories.

Ina Fichman only responded to a call put out by CBC Newsworld’s Roughcuts strand editor Jerry McIntosh to make The Last Trip once she had found the right director. The story, a follow-up to the tragic tale of three boys who drove across Canada in the summer of 1994 and killed themselves in a bunker in Vancouver, needed a helmer who was sensitive, bilingual and had experience in the field.

Fichman says she also needed a director who could gain the trust of the boys’ parents in order to get permission to use the journal the teenagers kept throughout their final journey.

‘I wasn’t going to pitch the film unless I found the right director. I had heard of Sylvie Van Brabant (who is also nominated for a Gemini) and she was the right person.’

Fichman says in making the film she was after ‘an understanding of why suicide has become such a social development in Canada. We have the third highest rate after New Zealand and Finland.’

Fichman’s financing structure was pretty straightforward. With Roughcuts triggering the project, it meant the $100,000 film went ahead with $75,000 from the cbc and the rest was made up via the Quebec tax credit, sales to cbc Montreal, CBC Prime Time News and Television Quatre Saisons. ‘We had no time to raise money,’ says Fichman of the low budget.

Laszlo Barna, who made The Negotiator with director Barry Greenwald, began with a project about collective bargaining and wound up with an electric account of union negotiations between the Canadian Auto Workers and de Havilland/Bombardier that almost ended in a strike.

The timing was crucial, and fortunately, Barna’s company, Barna Alper, has the financial grounding that when the clock struck, Barna and Greenwald could go ahead and shoot on tape, ‘without having to spend a year in applications for funding,’ as Barna puts it.

With what he calls ‘an incredible bag of footage’ quickly cut into a 45-minute demo, Barna approached cbc Witness strand editor Mark Starowicz and did a deal on the spot, ‘despite the fact that it has the most colorful language since Final Offer.’

Even the fifth estate’s Kaufman, behind what some might see as the protective guise of a steady, in-house job, has his challenges.

‘The reputation of the show is so widely known now it’s very difficult to get people to talk to us, especially on camera,’ he says. ‘Requests for payment is not the problem, it’s just that people who have something to hide don’t want to talk to us. On the other hand, we do attract a lot of people who want to give information without being known.’

It makes for a documentary approach which Kaufman describes as ‘investigative films that are based on research and often require imaginative techniques in order to get visuals.’

For the nominated Seal of Silence, about the Airbus scandal alleging illicit dealings between Air Canada, the government of Canada and Airbus, two people appeared in silhouette on camera and the rest of the primary sources were off-camera.

Seal of Silence was made for an undisclosed sum in-house at cbc with in-house researcher Harvey Cashore, producer Kaufman and reporter Trish Wood.

u.k. documentarian Annie Dodds hooked up for the third time with Julia Sereny of Sienna Films (and also for the third time with director John Walker) to make a sequel to Hidden Children. The Canada/British coproduction The Orphans of Manchuria was planned after Sereny’s company had joined u.k.’s October Films to produce The Hand of Stalin and at the time Sereny first heard about an organization called Hidden Children, a Jewish network of survivors who had been hidden as babies during the Holocaust and were often raised as Catholics.

Fifty-one percent of the budgets for Orphans and Children (about £370,000 for both) came from Channel Four’s Witness (religious programming) strand. The ofdc, Telefilm Canada, tvo, the Knowledge Network, cfcf and scn came in for the rest.

There are some obvious advantages, especially in financing, in doing a treaty coproduction, but Sereny says there are also some obstacles.

‘The challenge is to find stories that have the hook for broadcasters in Canada and abroad right off the start.’

Once you’ve got the content issue resolved, there are some elements of financing that are troublesome, continues Sereny. For example, in order to qualify as an independent production in Canada the property has to be owned by an independent producer whereas in the u.k. the documentary is owned by the broadcaster and contracted out to the independent producer. ‘There are all kinds of legal and contractual hoops you have to get through. Both sides of the pond have to be incredibly patient to make it happen, but it’s doable.’

The Voyage of the St. Louis, produced by Arnie Gelbart of Montreal-based Galafilm and directed by newcomer Maziar Bahari, is about the 1939 voyage of a luxury liner carrying 1,000 German refugees who had survived the early concentration camps.

The boat, headed for Cuba, was turned away at the last moment due to internal power struggles in Cuba, and as the ship was refused landing status in the u.s., some South American countries and then Canada, war was only four months away from breaking out in Germany.

Finally, just as the ship was ordered to sail back home, Britain, France, Holland and Belgium each agreed to take in 250 of the refugees.

Gelbart was attracted to the story right away and went (with Bahari) in search of survivors and people who had known them.

The first interested party on board for the film was tvo’s Rudy Buttignol for the strand A View From Here. The rest of the financing came together from the nfb (cash and services) and Paris-based coproducer Les Films d’Ici, which got Canal Plus onboard, and zdr in Hamburg.

Gelbart says the possible privatization of tvo is nothing short of disastrous. ‘The tvo thing is too awful to contemplate. tvo is the network in Canada that seems to have its vision together. It’s made a commitment to documentary and I think cbc will one day be catching up with it.’

Barna says, ‘I think what’s happening is a slippage in the amount of money available and people will have to think about how they are going to do movies for $200,000 to $250,000. What it means for me is we have to work more in conjunction with European and other North American broadcasters.’

Overall, he sees a strength developing in the documentary industry in Canada that has arisen from two traditions coming together.

‘There is a synthesis of two Canadian traditions: on the one hand it is represented by the journalistic community (the cbc approach) and on the other hand the school that came from the National Film Board. One tradition brought process and the other one brought facts to the medium. So what we have (now) is stronger fact-based but more process-developed. It used to be very ghettoized. We’ve discovered familyand now we’re all in one sinking boat.’