Montreal: More than 65 titles from the National Film Board’s English Program are in various stages of production or in this year’s distribution pipeline, including 40 documentaries and 13 high-profile, feature-length docs.

The program lineup includes wild and wonderful animation from award-winning directors John Weldon, Chris Hinton and Cordell Barker, a new creative website for children, and a Paul Cowan portrait of the working people who bet and lost on Westray.

Documentary highlights include John Paskievich’s My Mother’s Village, a Documentary West-produced cinematic journey of exile and memory based on the filmmaker’s experience as the child of a refugee; Linda Ohama’s Obaachan’s Garden, a Documentary West portrait of the filmmaker’s grandmother and her experience as a ‘Japanese picture bride’ in the 1920s; and Daniel Sekulich’s Aftermath: The Remnants of War, a Documentary Ontario coproduction with Aftermath Pictures evoking stories of war from France, Bosnia, Russia and Vietnam, presold to History Television.

Directors Tanya Tree and Merrily Weisbord team up on the intimate portrait Ted Allan: Minstrel Boy of the Twentieth Century, a Documentary East coproduction with Montreal’s Galafilm. It’s slated for delivery this fall and has been presold to both History Television and Bravo!

New NFB docs likely to attract wide interest include two Documentary Ontario productions, award-winning director John Zaritsky’s excited Ski Bums, a look at the strange breed of extreme skiers and snowboarders, and Kevin McMahon’s feature-length revisiting of the ideas and philosophy of Canada’s best-known thinker, McLuhan’s Wake, presold to TVOntario.

Also on tap, Tom Dodd’s Truckers, a sneak peek at the North American subculture of long-haul drivers, produced by Documentary West in Edmonton.

Docs licensed by CBC include Joe Blasioli’s epoch-making Chuvalo vs. Ali and The Nature of Things entry, Drug Deals: Anatomy of a Prescription Drug, an NFB/Merit Motion Pictures coproduction from director Elise Swerhone.

Docs licensed by CTV include Teresa MacInnes’ Waging Peace, an NFB/Triad coproduction on one highschooler’s brave campaign to stop student violence, and Robert Duncan’s When A Child Goes Missing, an inside perspective of the lives of four families who have experienced the nightmare, slated for CTV’s Signature Series.

Cowan’s Westray:

six years in the making

Veteran NFB filmmaker Paul Cowan (Give Me Your Soul, Lessons) is completing post on Westray, an 80-minute chronicle of the lives of six people, three widows and three surviving miners, whose destinies were changed forever by the May 8, 1992 Westray mine explosion disaster.

The film was originated on Super 16mm and is produced by Documentary East in Halifax. It was prepped in 1995, with shooting starting in 1996 and resuming in ’99 and 2000.

Cowan says the film’s dramatized elements ‘are much more a part of the stream of consciousness of the six characters who make up the film.’

Told in three parts, the film is witness to how the six survivors come together, their experience during the week of the explosion and its aftermath.

‘We’re not trying to redo the work of the Commission of Inquiry. We are just placing [the story] in the context of their lives and what happened to them. It’s very much a story of working people with no options who put their lives on the line, and in this case, paid for it big time.’

The NFB’s Preview 2001 slate includes two new films from last year’s Reel Diversity East competition winners, Attif Siddiqi’s Chances, an examination of men looking for love, and Kaveh Nabatian’s 645 Wellington, a portrait of the colorful individuals fighting to save a historical building in Old Montreal.

In youth programming, six new ACI studio animation titles have been added to the Talespinners collection of cross-cultural short films for children.

ACI/Animation Jeunesse anticipates a fall launch for Destination For Kids, ‘a safe place on the Web [mainly for kids nine to 12] that celebrates imagination and opens up new worlds by encouraging creation, play and exploration.’

Over the past year, the NFB was less active in coproduction, although the reduction does not reflect any changes in policy, says Barbara Janes, the English Program’s director-general. ‘But we do try to stay away from multi-part series as much as we can because it is not necessarily what we do best.’ Coproduction represents on average between 25% and 30% of the board’s annual program output.

In 2000/01, the average per minute cost (including development and completion) of an NFB documentary is $7,300, or about $340,000 for a 47-minute production. The range goes from a low of $2,700 per minute to as high as $12,000, ‘depending on whether it’s a process film, [the level of] foreign travel or shooting, or a film with a lot of expensive archival footage,’ says Janes, who is leaving the board at the end of August after nine remarkable and indeed tumultuous years heading up the English Program.

Domestic revenues

Domestic revenues for the English Program in 2000/01 are $2.3 million, with revenue from Canadian TV sales down slightly from previous years to $750,000, reflecting less new business and start-ups in the specialty channel sector. The lion’s share of revenues is from sell-through video, $1.6 million last year. ‘And we’ll see also what the new digital channels might mean for us,’ says Janes.

The NFB is partnering with Corus Entertainment, CBC and four independent Canadian production companies on The Documentary Channel, a new Category 1 digital service slated to launch this fall.

The new doc service earlier said it will license 100 hours a year from the NFB and 200 hours from CBC.

NFB library titles are likely to find a home as well at Land & Sea, a Corus/CBC joint venture with the thematic focus on rural life and natural resources.

The English Program’s overall budget is $29 million, with about $18.5 million set aside for direct production and another $3 million for marketing. The annual budget for the Filmmakers’ Assistance Program remains unchanged at $500,000.

Janes says the NFB is slated to receive additional federal funding for the digitization of its library collection. ‘The number of films we are making available through CineRoute [about 800] is less an issue of digitization than the underlying rights issues,’ she says.

The NFB unveiled its 2001 Preview slate at a round of late-May press conferences attended by many filmmakers and producers in Montreal, Halifax, Toronto, St. John’s and Winnipeg.

Playback will publish more information on the NFB’s 2001 Preview slate in upcoming issues. *

-www.nfb.ca