It was a time to sit down and discuss nuts and bolts, dollars and cents. At the Atlantic Film and Television Conference in June, representatives from all four provinces projected a $150 million regional industry by the year 2001, with a ripple effect of $450 million in economic impact.

Those big numbers don’t look like pipe dreams when you consider the figures for Nova Scotia, the region’s largest production sector. The Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation projects a production total of $21.5 million in 1996, up from $17 million in 1995 and way up from $7 million in 1993. And these numbers don’t include guest production.

In the first quarter of 1996, the nsfdc committed $1.4 million to 38 projects. Program administrator John Wesley Chisholm says there were over 50 applications for the first round of funding, five times more than last year. While he attributes a significant portion of that increase to the new Nova Scotia Film Industry Tax Credit, he also sees a second wave of companies coming into their own, and established producers maturing, companies like Imagex, Salter Street, Cochran Entertainment and Citadel.

‘We’re seeing the formation of new, truly developed production companies, a light on the horizon for new producers. There’s an impressive variety of projects in this second wave – from innovative gay and lesbian film to science and technology documentary.’

Regional harmonization

The conference, hosted annually by the Prince Edward Island Media Arts Co-op, also hosted a two-day roundtable discussion on how to develop regional policies. At the top of the list was a ‘no borders’ labor strategy, which would provide a labor tax rebate to producers who employ crew from any of the four provinces.

According to conference co-ordinator Larry LeClair, ‘regional harmonization’ was the catch phrase.

‘The consensus was that we need a certain level of uniformity in each province structurally,’ says LeClair. ‘Now that both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have that, the push is on to have some sort of equivalent in p