One day before the Canadian Independent Film & Video Fund was to name its latest round of recipients, the Department of Canadian Heritage announced the fund was being cut by $250,000, a major blow to independent documentary filmmakers who depend on the money to finance and finish their projects.

With an annual budget of just $1.4 million, 14% of the CIFVF’s money is gone for this year and next, and seven projects that were set to receive funding were completely shut out. Other producers, meanwhile, received considerably less than they had expected, leaving their films in limbo.

‘It’s really most unfortunate. While we understand that everyone has to take their share of the cuts, this is such a small fund that if they keep knocking us back there’s going to be nothing left,’ says CIFVF executive director Robin Jackson.

Montreal-based documentary filmmaker Ole Gjerstad had two proposals in with the fund for consideration. One, The Muskox Patrol (about Mounties sent to the high Arctic to fend off foreign interlopers and hunters) was in line for production funding of about $40,000, while his proposal for Uranium City Lives! (about a uranium mining ghost town in Northern Saskatchewan) was up for $10,000 in development assistance. In the end, he received $30,000 for Muskox, and after the jury was set to allot $8,000 for Uranium City, it was cut from the list.

‘There was no recourse, no time or possibility to go back to the decision makers about this and explain the effect this cut will have on a number of filmmakers in this corner of our industry,’ says Gjerstad. ‘The thinking within Heritage Canada falls short of what I would have expected and hoped for from them.’

Sandy Crawley, executive director of the Documentary Organization of Canada, is none too pleased with the cut, fearful that government has targeted the CIFVF to ‘wither away,’ hoping no one will notice. Crawley says if that is the case, the decision makers behind the cutback are wrong.

‘There’s a new emphasis amongst the cultural bureaucracy on gaining audience, being commercial and competing with Hollywood, and an important part of our film culture could be lost in that process,’ says Crawley. ‘The bureaucrats that are making the decisions are so far from production that they don’t understand the damage they’re doing with a cut like this.’

According to Jackson, the true test will come in 2005 when the CIFVF comes up for renewal.

‘That’s when we’re going to have to call on our clientele to help us lobby to ensure this kind of funding is still available for the producers we serve,’ says Jackson. ‘We are geared to the non-theatrical market and have a lot of end users in terms of educators, librarians and people in community associations, so we would have to call on them as well to help us fight this battle.’

Some of the 63 projects (out of the 210 project applications) that did get CIFVF funding this year include Sondhi Productions’ Dance Me Inside, First Voice Multimedia’s Journey of Speed, Les Film JPG’s Spoonman and Lo Tekk’s Waiting for Martin.

-www.cifvf.ca