This year’s field of 86 nominees for Rockie Awards includes only five Canadian-connected contenders. Nominations were winnowed from a field of more than 1,000 program entries and include such international luminaries as Friends, Frasier, The Sopranos and The West Wing.

Other countries represented on the nominees list include Austria, Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.

Leading the field is the U.S. with 34 nominations (including productions with other countries), followed by the U.K. with an interest in 25 nominations. Canada comes in as the sixth most-nominated country after Germany, France and the Netherlands.

Following are snapshots of the five Canadian contenders.

Le Chapeau

National Film Board

Le Chapeau from the National Film Board, nominated in the best animation program slot, is a six-minute film tells a story of suppressed memories and incest through the vehicle of a hat. Producers were Therese Descary for the first part of the project and Pierre Hebert for the remainder.

The hand-drawn, black-and-white ink animation came from the film’s director, Michele Cournoyer, who describes the piece as a very personal project.

Cournoyer says because of Hebert, ‘there was no compromise’ on the project. ‘It was very important because the film is extremely audacious. There was no censoring at all. I had a lot of freedom.

‘It’s only at the NFB that I could have the time and the freedom to do such experimentation.’

Cournoyer drew the 4,000 drawings over three years after jettisoning her first year and a half of work, done on a computer, because she wanted to change technique. ‘There were a lot of layers. It was too heavy for such a subject, it was too realistic,’ she explains.

The animation was inspired in part by the fact that 70% of exotic dancers were abused as children. In Le Chapeau, such a dancer catches sight of a customer in a hat like her father’s and remembers her childhood of abuse.

‘She opens her eyes at the end and realizes what happened to her [as a child]. It’s like she’s screaming; it’s like she renounces it,’ says Cournoyer. ‘At the end she is conscious of all the abuse she has lived through and you can hear the scream in the film. That means she doesn’t want to be abused anymore.’

Hot Type ‘J.K. Rowling’

CBC Newsworld

The CBC Newsworld Hot Type episode nominated in the best information program category is memorable for its unusual setting: the interview with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was slotted into her British cross-country book tour, part of which involved a steam train.

Given the only interview for the whole of Canada, Hot Type host Evan Solomon and his producer Andrew Johnson were allotted 90 minutes during the four-hour train ride between Manchester and York. And just to make the process more challenging, the noise of the train resulted in the cameras being turned off no fewer than 20 times.

‘Ten minutes into the shoot I’m sitting over to the side thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is going to be unusable,’ ‘ says Johnson.

Instead, the interview delved into things the author rarely likes to talk about: her stint on welfare, for example, and charges that Harry Potter encourages children into witchcraft.

‘Sometimes when you stop an interview you lose a rhythm and you never get it back,’ says Johnson. ‘When you have to do that 20 times and the noise is horrible and it’s one of only two interviews for North America and the lights keep going on and off because of the tunnels and you worry that the guest will lose her train of thought…’

The Awful Truth

Salter Street Films

Each episode of Michael Moore’s The Awful Truth, produced by Salter Street Films of Halifax, is split into several mini-documentaries. The episode nominated in the best information program category is notable for two standout segments.

One, ‘Jeb vs. George,’ pitches Governor Bush of Florida against his brother, then-Governor George Dubya of Texas, in competition as to who has shipped more felons to the death chamber.

The second segment, ‘African-American Wallet Exchange,’ was thought up following the Amadou Diallo verdict, which saw several New York policemen acquitted of killing West African immigrant Diallo, who was shot after the wallet he had in his hand was mistaken for a firearm.

The African American Wallet Exchange is designed to put an end to misunderstandings like this. The program simply exchanges dark wallets with bright orange or yellow fluorescent replacements, in a similar manner to the replacement program several years ago that swapped children’s far-too-realistic water pistols for toys that were too brightly colored to be mistaken for the real thing.

‘Within the documentary there are other suggestions about how to not get shot by the NYPD if you’re black,’ says Charles Bishop, vice-president of production at Salter. ‘One is walking around with your hands permanently up in the air. Another is to disguise yourself as a garbage can so you can easily hide or to paint yourself as bricks so you can blend into a brick wall.’

The Four Seasons

Rhombus Media

Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a one-hour dance special performed by the National Ballet of Canada and produced by Toronto’s Rhombus Media, is nominated for the best performance program.

The Four Seasons is a coproduction with Victoria Tennant Productions: Tennant was herself a dancer before becoming a producer. ‘She came to us with the idea,’ says Rhombus president Sheena Macdonald.

Director on the project is Barbara Willis Sweete, also a partner in Rhombus, whom Macdonald credits with a skillful adaptation from stage to screen. ‘You can’t imagine how electric she has made this dance, it’s so visual. When you watch this you’re just on the edge of your seat, you feel like you’re in there. The camera is part of the dance; it just adds another dimension,’ she says.

‘In many cases dance is not filmed correctly for the medium of television; that’s what made Barbara’s work so brilliant. Every shot is framed so brilliantly you just gasp.’

Macdonald is unequivocal about the value of a Rockie nomination: ‘We’ve had quite a few nominations. It’s a great prize, a very important prize to us. It’s one of the few TV festival prizes that’s truly international and carries a lot of weight, so my buyers pay a lot of attention to the Rockies. It’s very prestigious in their minds, and that’s largely to do with Pat Ferns promoting this festival around the world. They’re aware of it, they take it seriously.’

Cinema Verite: Defining

the Moment

National Film Board

Producer Adam Symansky says Peter Wintonick’s Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment, a National Film Board documentary about the rebel cinema verite doc movement of the ’50s and ’60s, came about partly in response to the ongoing controversy among doc makers as to whether what they do is straight reportage or not.

‘It involves creative observation and interpretation of everyday life. [Directors] are continuously making choices about what to shoot and what to edit, so you’re getting a director’s vision of what the world is,’ says Symansky.

‘We wanted to capture in some way this form of filmmaking and we focussed on cinema verite because the art of creative observation exploded in the late 1950s and early 1960s, partly because of technology and because of social factors.’

Nominated in the best arts documentary category, the film covers the cinema verite movement in Canada, the U.S., France and Britain by way of interviews with filmmakers and excerpts of films, linked with narration played over home movies of the filmmakers’ surroundings shot by film scholar Kirwan Cox.

Cinema Verite also served as something of a tribute to the greats of the genre who ‘are coming to the end of their careers.

‘What we tried to do is put the filmmaker back into the moment of discovery when they were first shooting in this way, to get a sense of the absolute joy of the freedom that filmmaking produced,’ says Symansky.

‘The other half was to show what the heritage of that has been – everything from commercials to Survivor. It’s now become that if you want fiction to look more real you shoot in the style of 1960s verite. It’s become a hallmark of reality and so it’s become a falsehood now as well. We wanted to show how it started and what was behind it, and to some extent measure how that tradition continues today.’ *