Sharing in the production funding pain, documentary makers saw the largesse of the Canadian Television Fund’s Licence Fee Program dwindle 25% to $16.5 million in the spring round announced May 27.

Anticipating the downturn, however, documentary applications were down 10% to 209 in 2003 compared with 2002, and total requests also shrunk 12% to $24.8 million.

Overall, 120 applicants, or 57%, made the cut and will produce 495 hours of doc programming. In 2002, 75% of applicants were funded when there was $22 million to share.

This year, the English-language market was harder hit by the cuts, down 26% (to $10.4 million) compared to the 23% drop in French documentary (to $6.1 million).

‘Certainly, we’re not pleased, but we didn’t expect it to be much better,’ says Sandy Crawley, Toronto-based executive director of the Documentary Organization of Canada. ‘The approvals point to more industrial than cultural programming. [For instance], the opportunity to create feature-length, one-off, point-of-view documentaries is seriously endangered by a combination of funding problems and, possibly, policies at the major agencies. The pressure is on for us to produce safer, cheaper productions.’

Point-of-view documentaries were actually up in number (22 English-language and eight French-language in 2003 compared to 18 English and six French in 2003). But, with the funding frozen at $2 million for the genre, the average LFP contribution was down almost 23%.

On the English side, the CBC sponsored eight of the successful POV applicants, including Beethoven’s Hair ($120,000 to Rhombus Media), Bloomsday Cabaret ($118,707 to Rock Island Productions) and Shipbreakers ($110,209 to Storyline Entertainment). VisionTV commissioned five successful POV docs.

In the French envelope, Radio-Canada commissioned seven of the nine winning applications, including Voler sa vie ($124,349 to Productions Nova Media) and La Griffe magique ($92,025 to L’Amour en l’an 2000).

Crawley also suggests that the CTF analysts may not be appropriately applying the documentary definitions that DOC helped write.

Veteran POV documentary maker Peter Raymont of White Pine Pictures in Toronto, for example, failed in his appeal to get LFP funding for his documentary about Canadian eye doctors who travel to third-world countries to bring sight to the blind.

Raymont says the rejection was not based on points but rather on the LFP’s view that the documentary did not qualify as POV. The LFP didn’t get more specific, he says. And because Discovery Health Channel, a diginet with smaller broadcast licences, commissioned the production, it wasn’t able to compete with the other docs that had proportionally larger licence fees in their budgets.

‘The only way to get a show like this going is through the POV envelope,’ says Raymont. ‘We’re scrambling. We’re probably not going to be able to make the film.’

The LFP, however, has to deal with an evolving genre and market demands, says Phil Serruya, CTF director of communications. ‘We have to look at what are true documentaries and we have to keep pace with what the market demands,’ he says.

Among successful documentaries not called POV, 72% of titles are new or renewed series of between two and 26 episodes.

Thirty-eight applicants are new series while 26 are returning.

The Equity Investment Program results, the second funding phase for documentaries, are expected in a couple of weeks. Both the LFP and EIP have second smaller funding rounds for documentaries this fall. Total CTF resources this year are $230 million, down from $260 million last year.

-www.canadiantelevisionfund.ca