With the recent revamping of the Canadian Television Fund guidelines and the Feature Film Policy Review Committee recommendations, Playback takes a look at the potential impact on the Quebec production industry. The report features a discussion of these issues with Radio-Canada’s director-general of programming Daniel Gourd and apftq producers association chairman Andre Picard. We also take and an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the making of Quebec’s most expensive, and publicly financed, filmed tv drama, Omerta: le dernier des hommes d’honneur.

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APFTQ chairman Andre Picard says he’s personally concerned with recent industry developments which could work to undermine important public institutions including src/cbc, the National Film Board and the crtc.

‘I feel there are just too many private interests running after too little public good,’ says Picard. ‘The nfb has been attacked, stripped and pared down and its overall mandate is unclear. In principal, the [Heritage advisory committee] proposal that they should be involved with first-time filmmakers is fine, but what’s their place in the overall Canadian scheme of things?

‘Radio-Canada has also been chipped away, seen its mandate restrained. I’m not saying the place can’t be managed even more efficiently, but if we don’t watch it, in five years they [src] won’t be much more than a specialty service.’

Picard says while there’s some very interesting experimentation around high-definition and digital video production, the decline of more expensive film production and its replacement by the teleroman-plus series option, produced at about half the price, will bring down the quality of production and Quebec television in general.

‘Radio-Canada has always had a leadership position and always been an innovator and should continue to do so,’ he says. ‘And in a sense, the nfb should be that too.’

A role for the NFB

As for the nfb, he says it was behind the invention of the Nagra sound recording system, was the first to produce an imax 3D film, is presently up for an Oscar for its DigiSync retrieval system, ‘and played an intrinsic role in the launch of Softimage and Daniel Langlois’ company by permitting the production of [the experimental 3D film] Tony DePeltrie.’

‘To my mind this is not celebrated,’ Picard says. ‘It’s not widely circulated information. If they [the nfb] had taken even a small amount of shares in any of these inventions or companies, do you know where they’d be now?

‘Sure, there’s a greater role for private broadcasters and independent producers in our country today, but there’s still a place [for a public agency] that has a laboratory, a research center for r&d, [even if] it’s more in partnership with the private sector and other educational centers and institutions.’

Picard says as the private sector has gained better access to limited national production funds, the public sector continues to have a role in terms of startups and as an innovator and risk-taker.

‘You can’t evacuate the public sector in the long term, particularly in the cultural sphere,’ he says.

‘It shouldn’t be the teleroman-plus at the expense of `les grands series dramatiques,’ but now [broadcasters] are starting say, `Hey, we’re getting the same ratings, it’s almost the same rate card [the cost of commercial airtime], therefore we’re more profitable.’ ‘