The sweet here and now

Telefilm Canada, tax credits, government support on the financing side; theaters, home video, pay-tv and the conventional tv industry on the distribution side. Taking all of their feature film funding support in one lump sum, it’s less than the cost of a single u.s. studio blockbuster. How sad and therefore how ironic, how delicious, this particular buzz around Canadian films at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival.

The feature film community is talking about the Telefilm Canada-commissioned Houle report, a paper written by industry consultant Michel Houle which has not been released to the public but is said to propose combined private sector/government initiatives along the line of the ctcpf model to increase the resource base for feature films.

To do that theoretically requires the involvement of the television sector, largely awol when it comes to feature films.

Conventional tv broadcasters haven’t been pulling their weight, with the notable exceptions of Citytv and TMN-The Movie Network.

The pay-tv network contributes $10 million annually to the Canadian movie industry through prebuys, licensing and equity investments and through The Harold Greenberg Fund.

During the ’97/98 season, City backed 12 Canadian films through prebuys at the treatment, outline or script stage. Better yet, licence fees at the Toronto-based station are going up. Equally if not more importantly, City plays at least one Canadian feature in primetime per week.

In comparison, Global and ctv are nowhere to be found on the Canadian feature spectrum whereas the private networks in countries like Britain and Australia have played a key role in the process. Baton is lately engaged, scoring the tv rights to The Sweet Hereafter. There is no incentive mechanism in place to ensure it happens again.

The cbc, although a willing participant, has minimized its role by demanding access six months after its theatrical release, which naturally it doesn’t get.

Heritage Minister Sheila Copps has voiced her commitment to solving the dearth of support for the domestic feature film industry. While Telefilm and Houle work behind the scenes on the politics, it could be time for broadcasters to rethink the Canadian film stereotype (too artsy, too obscure, bad production values, too much death).

In spite of years of being mostly ignored by the tv players, the Canadian feature film industry is making headlines (the survival stereotype, now that still holds).

Who’s kidding who, it’s a miracle of God, Robert Lantos and the Canadian Film Centre that any films get made in this country and it’s a long row to hoe finding the means of convincing the theater distributors to open up more than 5% of their screen time to domestic films. All will wait with anticipation for the cftpa’s feature film committee, chaired by Tom Berry, to release a comprehensive policy proposal at the end of the month, not to mention the vetting of Houle’s document.

But just this week, a little Canadian self-deprecating pat on the back is allowed. Happy festing.