Montreal: Jacques Bensimon is approaching the midway point of his five-year mandate as National Film Board chair and government film commissioner.

‘At this point in time we are really going to have to tighten up our ship,’ says Bensimon. It’s not about fatigue setting in, but rather all about gaining a second wind, he adds.

During his tenure, Bensimon has pushed hard to rebrand the NFB, especially within the production sector, among international coproduction circles, and has introduced a new element of market discipline so that the board has the resources to defend and expand its unique mandate.

As a producer and distributor, Bensimon says the first order of business for the NFB is content. The industry, he says, has otherwise largely come under the dominance of bankers and accountants. ‘Basically, when you do a pitch these days you state in one line what your film is about and then the rest of the time is spent putting the damn deal together and trying to access funding from public [agencies].’

The key to the industry’s, and indeed the country’s, future, says Bensimon, is identity.

‘How do we strike an identity for ourselves, our children, in order to make sure that our people have pride? We live in a market universe. Whether we like it or not the market drives the process. And culture has become part of the market system. Whatever we do, we also have to come up with an answer at that level.’

From his experience at TVOntario and TFO and the Banff Television Festival, Bensimon has introduced a dynamic realism to the board.

He continues to believe the NFB’s role is to lead in terms of innovation and social relevance, but within a market structure. ‘Films have to be sold. They have to be seen and monies have to be returned,’ he says.

In the first part of his mandate, Bensimon has been especially preoccupied with NFB branding issues.

Initiatives have included the Reel Diversity program, a $1-million annual commitment from the English Program side alone, with guaranteed distribution on CBC, Newsworld and Vision TV; an important agreement to coordinate and showcase NFB films on APTN; the development of broadcast showcases on specialty services such as Vision; and assuming managerial responsibility from Radio-Canada for the advanced Web platform SilenceOnCourt.TV, the recognized centre of French-language short film production.

On French TV, the NFB has an important slice of this fall’s primetime schedule on Tele-Quebec with the HD series Mission Arctique, and on SRC with Marche Jean Talon, a new ‘observational doc’ series coproduced with Montreal’s Galafilm Productions.

There is also a major coproduction series, in preproduction with Barna-Alper, on the Great Depression years, slated to air on History Television.

Another hugely important branding effort pushed by Bensimon is the International Co-Production Unit under executive producer Eric Michel.

ICU’s program permits the board to carry out large-scale projects through a series of deals signed over the past year with France’s INA and ARTE, the PBS consortium Lark International, National Geographic, Film Australia, and with BBC and the U.K. Film Council for the creation of the World Documentary Fund, a $1.8-million program launched at the Cannes Film Festival.

The NFB has also secured a coproduction partnership with France 2 for two private-sector-initiated feature-length documentaries.

‘This is an industry where a lot of people are in disarray and the only way to deal with that, as far as I am concerned, is to think globally,’ Bensimon says.

NFB distribution revenues were in the $5-million range last year (including $3 million in Canadian distribution), but Bensimon says that is projected to increase to $7.2 million this year.

The WDF films are commissioned specifically for theatrical release, but Bensimon points out that all the films have been prebought by CBC. And distribution wise, the agreement creates a new primetime window for NFB-branded product on BBC, which is putting up a third of the financing.

The first WDF production is Vikram Jayanti’s Game Over, Kasparov Against the Machine, a chronicle of chess grand master Gary Kasparov’s battle against IBM’s Deep Blue, coproduced by the NFB and Cafe Productions in the U.K. ‘We announced the WDF six months ago and we already have the first feature. It is distributed by Alliance Atlantis and we have already recouped our investment.’

Other parties, including parties from the U.S., are ‘knocking on the door’ looking for a piece of WDF’s program.

‘When you sign a deal with France 2, there are various things that happen. One is that they bring more money to the table as investors. Second, they give you first broadcast in primetime. And that’s the key,’ says Bensimon. Otherwise, he says, current acquisition prices are miserable, and a lot of time and energy is lost flogging product which ends up being shown in off-peak hours.

‘We want to work with la creme de la creme in world documentaries,’ says Bensimon.

ICU is the leading commercial edge of both the English and French Programs, and Michel reports to both English Program director-general Tom Perlmutter and French Program director-general Andre Picard.

ICU is involved in some 20 coproductions with cumulative budgets of $27 million. The NFB’s share of financing is under 25%, however the NFB is the international distributor of the films through its distribution unit headed by director-general Johanne St-Arnauld.

Selected ICU coproductions are:

* Arctic Mission, the five-film (and theatrical feature) HD environmental-exploration collection, coproduced by Glacialis Production and France’s Gedeon Programmes, budgeted at nearly $6 million

* The three-hour doc series Les Femmes et la guerre, coproduced with Agat Films of France

* Paul Cowan’s Peackeepers, a two-hour examination of UN peackeeping coproduced with 13 Productions of France and ARTE of Germany

* Milosevic on Trial, a two-hour coproduction with the U.K. and Denmark

* The Water Project, a two-hour investigative look at the growing privatization of water resources, coproduced with France and Germany

* Diameter of the Bomb, a feature-length doc on the extreme and personalized violence in the Middle East from director Steven Silver and NFB producer Claude Bonin, coproduced with BBC and Rainmaker Films in the U.K.

In its just-released 2002/03 annual report, the NFB reports funding from the Government of Canada was $66.3 million.

Total expenditures for the year ending March 31, 2003 were $73.6 million, up from $69 million in ’02. Expenditures for English production were $26.2 million, $17.1 million for French production, and $8.9 million for Communications and Outreach Development, headed by director-general Laurie Jones.

-www.nfb.ca