John Haslett Cuff is a former film and TV actor, film critic and journalist. As the TV critic for The Globe and Mail (1986-1997), he won two National Newspaper Awards. He joined Aysha Productions as partner and VP in 1998, and with his partner Sun-Kyung Yi, has produced and written award-winning documentaries on subjects ranging from divorce to international sex slavery.

Besides making enough money to live and maintain a viable business infrastructure in which to pursue the financing, as well as the ‘art’ of documentary filmmaking, the biggest challenge facing the independent filmmaker in Canada (and the world at large) is essentially philosophical.

If all art is intrinsically the expression of an individual voice, how can a single voice find expression in an increasingly global media universe in which the dominant principles are profit and propaganda to preserve the status quo? For a writer and journalist, there are probably more outlets for the individual voice than ever, but the writer’s voice is invariably drowned out in the clamor of electronic noise we laughably call communication.

Indeed there are also more outlets for producers of television thanks to satellite, cable and Internet service providers controlled by an oligarchy of the most powerful communications giants the world has ever seen.

But because television is so collaborative and so expensive, the individual voice is almost immediately diluted and eventually muted by the demands of a marketplace in which the individual voice is fundamentally antithetical to the imperatives of commercial television.

Anyone making television documentaries in pursuit of those ideals which include truth, beauty and social justice and giving voice to the powerless in an attempt to illuminate something important about the human condition, is undertaking a Sisyphean ascent up a mountain of indifference.

When my partner (Sun-Kyung Yi) and I first began making documentary films in 1996 (Scenes From a Corner Store) we were still naive enough to think that there was a network audience for the kind of work that first inspired us and had sustained the documentary tradition in Canada and abroad for more than 60 years.

We were motivated by our admiration for the works of Frederick Wiseman, the Maysles brothers, Donald Brittain, Paul Cowan and Allan King, and we believed the documentary form to have a basic integrity and value that transcended the petty politics and corrupt economics of the television business at large. We also felt especially fortunate to live and work in Canada, which has a commitment to public broadcasting (the CBC and TVOntario, most notably) that exists in few other countries.

Thanks primarily to those institutions and Telefilm Canada, we have together written, produced and directed seven one-hour documentaries (including Thai Girls and Vanishing Acts) and a 13-part documentary series (Love is Not Enough) in the intervening six years. But the scales have definitely fallen from our eyes.

My metamorphosis from TV critic at The Globe and Mail into writer, director and producer of television documentaries has confirmed some of my worst suspicions about the stupidity and fraudulence of the television business.

Hunter S. Thompson was right on the money when he characterized the industry as being populated by ‘thieves and pimps’ and while he was talking about the U.S, the industry in Canada has its own share of the same. Just watch the bold caricatures of Made in Canada or any number of so-called ‘reality’ television shows in which the attractive flesh of young women and men is peddled shamelessly in primetime.

And some of these people who have pandered so profitably to the basest instincts of their ever-shrinking audience would like nothing more than to shut down public broadcasting in this country.

They fail to understand or choose to ignore that public broadcasting is arguably the last and most important outpost of individual expression in a democratic society.

Politically, economically and culturally, public broadcasting should be the most original, provocative and illuminating of all electronic media – whether in documentary, news and opinion or drama. But of course it has been under siege for decades, hobbled by sclerotic unions and hamstrung by political interference and routine budgetary bloodletting that has forced public broadcasters to become as dependent on corporate largesse as the private networks.

As you might expect, the philosophical conundrum of the independent filmmaker is inevitably subsumed by the demands of a marketplace that enthusiastically embraces the banal, the sensational and the celebrity. The marketplace neither cares for nor understands most basic principles of either documentary film or the role of public broadcasting in a democratic society.

Yet good documentary films are one of the most significant contributions that television – both public and private – can make to public discourse and the dissemination of information. Tough as it is to make ‘television that matters,’ independent filmmakers keep trying, because documentary film about the human drama is still the most interesting and under-appreciated form of television.