Montreal: The National Film Board’s English Program has over 60 titles in production or slated for release this coming fall and winter.

Director-general Tom Perlmutter estimates there are nearly 100 projects, including coproductions and Internet-related projects, in early production or development at the English Program.

Two NFB documentaries are among the four selected for this year’s Perspective Canada program at the Toronto International Film Festival – Gil Cardinal’s Totem, a Pacific & West Studios story about the return of a West Coast totem from a Swedish museum, presold to Newsworld, and director/coproducer Ann Marie Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, about Vaudeville’s most famous Chinese magician.

There are now three filmmakers who work full time with the English Program: Alanis Obomsawin, Paul Cowan and Beverly Shaffer.

‘They are enormously productive and unique,’ says Perlmutter. ‘Alanis is a treasure and her connection to Outreach [programs] and with communities across the country is unstinting.’

Obomsawin (Is the Crown at War with Us?) is arguably the country’s most important chronicler of Aboriginal life and politics. She is the producer of Dale Montour’s For John, a statement on the devastating effects of youth suicide in the Aboriginal community. Her latest doc, through the Quebec Centre, is Our Nationhood, a revisiting of the Listugui community since their resistance in 1981 and 1998. It’s slated for this fall’s festival circuit.

Cowan is shooting Peacekeepers, an English/French two-hour coproduction with France through the NFB’s International Co-Production Unit, with veteran exec producer Eric Michel. ‘[Cowan] has unprecedented access to the United Nations and has been shooting in the Congo and in Georgia,’ says Perlmutter.

In terms of projects from emerging filmmakers, Perlmutter points to On Holy Ground by Samir Mallal and Ben Addelman, a one-hour look at student conflict around the Arab-Israeli question at Concordia University in Montreal. ‘One [of the filmmakers] is Arab and one is Jewish, but it wasn’t set up. It seems to us what is interesting here is that this tests the very notion of multiculturalism,’ he says.

Upcoming releases include Yves Dion’s Promised Land, a four-hour, seven-year process doc series that follows the lives of new immigrants to Quebec, from the day they arrive.

Katherine Gilday’s feature doc Women and Men Unglued examines the challenges facing heterosexual relationships, and is another fall ’03 festival release.

Daniel Sekulich’s feature-length doc Shipbreakers, a $650,000 coproduction with Storyline Entertainment, was shot in HD and is a visually stunning portrait of India’s notorious maritime graveyard in Alang. The doc is coproduced through the NFB’s Ontario Centre under exec producer Sylvia Sweeney.

The average NFB doc budget is between $200,000 and $250,000, although there are projects with lower budgets. ‘The difference [with the private-sector approach],’ says Perlmutter, ‘is that we will spend three months on research, and maybe instead of three or four days, like with these reality [TV] things, 20 to 30 shooting days.’

On the broadcast sector, Perlmutter says the board has positive relations with CBC.

‘CBC is the broadcast partner on the [World Documentary Fund] films and our Reel Diversity initiative,’ says Perlmutter. ‘As well, we’re involved in a range of productions for The Nature of Things,’ including Barbara Doran’s two-part The Man Who Studies Murder and Phillipe Baylaucq’s poetic history of Sable Island, Moving Sands, a copro with Montreal’s La Fete Productions.

‘We also do special projects with Alliance Atlantis. We’re doing a four-hour series on the Great Depression in Canada with them.’ The series is in preproduction with Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions. History Television is the licensee and the budget is around $350,000 an hour.

In fiscal ’03, there were 2,222 English-Canadian TV broadcasts of NFB titles, up from 1,521 the previous year.

The NFB’s English Program production budget in ’03 was $26.2 million.

-www.nfb.ca