As 486 registered buyers and sellers, more than 500 media and untold numbers of producers, would-be producers, financiers, and cinephiles gather for the world’s annual second largest celebration of feature films, looking at the screen, you’d think it’d been a walk in the park. Those little frames of celluloid seamlessly threading into stories, 311 of them all told from 53 countries and a record 39 features from Canada. Piece of cake.

Actually, no. Case in point: the National Film Board/Canada Wild Productions docudrama The Herd. The follow-up to Peter Lynch’s Project Grizzly, the film centers on a piece of Canadian history dating back to 1929 when Carl Lomen, the Alaskan ‘Reindeer King,’ sold part of his herd to the Canadian government which wanted to move them to provide a living for the Mackenzie Delta Inuit. The 1,500-mile migration, which began with 3,000 reindeer and a small staff of Inuit and Sami herders, was slated to take 18 months. Instead it took six years to get them to Kittigazuit (We’re looking it up too).

If that sounds rough, it’s at least on scale with Lynch’s project, which began in 1993 after cowriter Nicholas McKinney brought the history to his attention.

In the years in between then and now, the creative and production team weathered Hi-8s freezing in the Tuktoyaktuk peninsula, polar bears, four-legged protagonists that were miles north by the time the crew finished tea and the fallout from vastly underestimating how stubborn reindeer can be.

‘Herding’ proved difficult. Says Lynch: ‘You can herd them with helicopters, but as one native said, `They get wise, eh?’ After a while, especially during mating season, they just ignore the helicopters even though they’re 30 feet above them. We were always on Plan d by noon.’

For the full story, see the film diary in this issue, but herein lies the funding metaphor. No matter how plentiful the Perspective Canada lineup is this year, it’s still herding reindeer to get a feature financed. What’s required, as outgoing Alliance Communications executive Robert Pattillo likes to say, is ‘More rum in bigger bottles, more pavement for wider roads,’ which may be coming in the much-anticipated new $50-million government fund for feature films.

The cbc has stepped up to the plate to play a major role in what cbc’s executive director of network programming Slawko Klymkiw calls ‘the effort to establish features as Canada’s third cultural success story.’

This is important, drawing the public broadcaster into the development of Canadian feature films and capitalizing on what has been a long-lost opportunity for filmmakers to find support on homegrown broadcasting.

But Klymkiw makes the point that the model the cbc looks at is Britain’s Channel 4, which is the commissioning broadcaster on both Secrets and Lies and Trainspotting.

As the jockeying for control over the anticipated new public production fund continues, it may be worthwhile noting the difference between the two.

Just as pitching The Herd at Jerry Bruckheimer would have been an exercise in futility (‘There’s these reindeer, see, and they won’t go in the direction they’re supposed to go in, and these people in furry coats try to move them through the snow to get them to the starving Inuit… ‘), so might be a similar exercise found in pitching Dirty to the cbc (‘There’s four dysfunctional Vancouverites with various joys and addictions and full frontal nudity… ).

Although the cbc is looking for a stronghold on a new fund, it can only help producers if other broadcasters looking for a way in to support feature films have equal access to any new financing injected by the federal government.

chum and TMN-The Movie Network have long proven their willingness to invest in Canadian film. No matter how the tide of sentimentality runs towards supporting the beleaguered public broadcaster, it shouldn’t play a role advancing the creation of Canadian features that works to marginalize the ability of willing private broadcasters to flex their creative muscle. Both the likes of Bruce Sweeney’s Dirty and The Herd have a place here.

Happy festing. We’ll be the ones in black.