Director Ann Kennard has experience filming in none too accessible places.

After all, she’s the award-winning documentary filmmaker behind The Powder Room, where all sorts of juicy tidbits are revealed by women trading lipstick in front of washroom mirrors and chatting from behind stalls.

But Kennard says her current project was even more of a challenge. She has spent the last few months in Waterloo, Ont., trying to capture on camera a cultural community forbidden by their religion to pose for pictures. The project, exploring the origins and evolution of the Mennonite community of St. Jacob’s, is one of 13 half-hours in the new doc series A Scattering of Seeds, exec produced by Peter Raymont, to be simulcast beginning January 1998 on History Television and Radio-Canada. Vision tv and scn are taking a second window.

Kennard, of course, has managed to find a technicality to get around the filming taboo.

‘If we film the Mennonites while they are doing what they normally do then they aren’t posing,’ she says. ‘But if I ask them if I can film them while they are at work, they aren’t allowed to give me permission. As long as you don’t ask, it’s okay.’

It was Kennard’s fascination with the secretive nature of Mennonite culture that led her to pitch the idea to Raymont and coproducers Lindalee Tracey and Maria Pimentel. The episode chronicles Benjamin Eby, who crossed the Canadian border in 1807 in a horse cart carrying a quilt stitched with 10,000 pockets, each containing an American silver dollar. He used the coins to buy off the mortgages on the 60,000 acres of land that became the St. Jacob’s Mennonite community.

Setting this series apart from the crop of immigration docs is the gathering of leading directors from across the country to each explore the roots of their own ethnic heritage on film.

The result is 13 highly personalized stories of the immigrant experience, a portrait of one individual or family and their part in the making of an ethnic enclave. As members of the communities, Raymont says the directors managed a far more intimate access than generally afforded to documentary filmmakers

Raymont himself has found funding and sales potential from all sorts of avenues. With the ethnic Canada angle to the project, the $110,000 per episode budget was pieced together with grants from the Canada Information Office, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (the agency put up one-third of the total budget) and Multiculturalism Canada. The usual suspects – Telefilm, the ctcpf, and federal and Ontario government tax credits, were also accessed. A gap financing loan came by way of Rogers Telefund, and Raymont has taken a small deferral.

Multiculturalism Canada has also kicked in funding for the writing and production of teachers’ guides to get the series into schools, as well as a Website, to be up and running in January. Along with the National Film Board, the agency is also putting in money for each director to hire filmmaker interns from the community being profiled. A modern Mennonite schoolteacher, Allen Martin, acted as a liaison on Kennard’s project.

Opportunities for sales to the educational marketplace are currently being explored, the likes of school boards, ministries of education and government departments. Book publishers are being approached to collaborate on the series and a cd-rom project is under investigation.

Raymont is looking ahead in anticipation of a second order. But he’s not banking on the tenuous chances of picking up Telefilm and ctcpf funding once the gates reopen or Citizenship and Immigration offering a second round of grants. So he is already out courting corporate sponsors, targeting company ceos who are recent immigrants or come from families connected with ethnic communities in Canada.

Among the directors involved in the series are Peter d’Entremont, exploring his family history in the French-Acadian community of Pubnico, n.s., and Tom Radford, chronicling the life of his Great Grandfather who left Scotland to found the first newspaper in Edmonton.

Other eps are set in Montreal, Vancouver and throughout Ontario and explore Chinese, Ukraine, Sikh, Russian and Italian communities.

Other filmmakers on board are Tracey, Halya Kuchmij, Carl Bessai, Sylvia Sweeney, Keith Lock, Richard Boutet, Ali Kazimi, David Paperny, Linda Ohama, Patricia Fogliato and David Mortin.

The first six eps of A Scattering of Seeds are being delivered Oct. 30, with the second set slated for the end of December.