Before Da Vinci’s Inquest, Blue Murder, Diana Kilmury: Teamster and a truckload of Gemini Awards, all there was to Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions was husband-wife team Laszlo Barna and Laura Alper, and the mutual interest they shared in documentaries. And even with the higher-profile success of Barna-Alper’s episodic dramas, the company’s documentary division continues to produce acclaimed doc programs for television, and recently crossed the threshold into theatrical documentaries with The Take.

According to Barna, he and Alper turned to documentaries in the late 1970s after Barna grew tired of trying to make a career in theater production.

‘I loved the idea that I could call up someone I’d read about in the newspaper and say, ‘I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I’m going to poke my nose into your business,” says Barna. ‘That was such a novelty, and it was so exciting to be able to go anywhere and shoot anything that I was interested in. It was a breath of fresh air compared to a theater, which was isolated from the world.’

With Barna directing and Alper writing, the duo produced such films as The Business of Aging, Who Wants Unions and As Friend and Foe throughout the first half of the 1980s, all of which were made for the National Film Board.

To make ends meet while trying to get their docs off the ground, Barna-Alper would also take on industrial films.

It was while working on one of these, The Negotiator, produced for the Canadian Auto Workers, that Barna-Alper first collaborated with writer/director Janice Tufford, now the company’s VP of documentary development and production. Tufford joined Barna-Alper full time in fall 2002 after helping to develop the series To Build a Nation.

It wasn’t until 1987 that Barna-Alper got its first major break in television. It came at a time when Canadian broadcasting was changing radically with the advent of specialty cable channels. The deputy head of the newly launched specialty CBC Newsworld, Michael Harris, commissioned Barna-Alper to create WorkWeek, a magazine show focused on labor issues. More than 100 episodes were produced, opening several doors for the prodco. Soon after, CBC commissioned the John Kramer-directed The Tenure of Dr. Fabrikant as Barna-Alper’s second Witness production.

When Newsworld VP Trina McQueen moved over to head up the new specialty Discovery Channel, she ordered the science series The Body: Inside Stories from the company, and suddenly Barna-Alper had grown into a credible and well-respected prodco known for its ability to complete challenging projects and quality work.

‘Within the ranks of the company, skilled researchers, editors and production teams were supporting great directors and turning out great programs,’ says Tufford. ‘Barna-Alper was making a reputation for itself as a company that knew how to make good television.’

As more specialty channels appeared on the dial, so did more Barna-Alper productions. Its first collaboration with History Television proved to be a goldmine for Barna-Alper, when the fledgling channel commissioned Turning Points of History, a one-hour that covers critical events that changed the world, now in its eighth season.

‘For Turning Points of History, we have boxes of awards. We don’t have the space to put them out. It is one of the most awarded series in the world; not just Canada, but the world,’ says Barna.

‘Turning Points of History is as old as the History network itself. I remember when we pitched it to Norm Bolen and Sydney Suissa, they had a card table, folding chairs, some index cards, and they weren’t on the air yet.’

Other notable early series include the six-part The Sexual Century for History and Canal D, Human Wildlife for Discovery and Canal D, several Life and Times episodes for CBC, and one of its most significant achievements, Frontiers of Construction, about the world’s most ambitious construction projects, for Discovery.

‘I travel a fair bit around the world right now,’ says Barna. ‘The one show that everybody has heard of, because it has had wide, wide, international distribution, is Frontiers of Construction. They know it all over the world, because it’s populist.

‘It’s a series that Trina McQueen gifted me. I went in and pitched a Frontiers-type show and Trina was smart enough to say, ‘Well, let’s not do a generic Frontiers show, let’s do one that people will get enthusiastic about every week.’ I said, ‘What would that be?’ And she said, ‘Construction.’ I thought she was crazy.’

Some well-received one-offs by the prodco include The Last Just Man (a doc about retired Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire’s time in Rwanda), which actually started out as an episode of Turning Points and went on to win Geminis in 2002 for directing, writing and historical documentary, and Barry Stevens’ Offspring, following the director on a search for his sperm-donor father, which won the Donald Brittain Award in 2002 and earned an International Emmy nomination.

But perhaps the most significant one-off doc for Barna-Alper is 2004’s The Take, the first documentary from TV host Avi Lewis and activist author Naomi Klein and the first documentary produced by Barna-Alper to be released theatrically. The film is about a group of Argentine auto-parts workers who defiantly bed down in their recently shut plant and refuse to leave.

The documentary has met with critical praise and about $130,000 in North American box-office receipts at the end of 2004.

‘As the documentary unfolded, all involved got very excited about the story and felt that it could be a feature,’ says Margaret O’Brien, Barna-Alper’s CFO and COO. ‘We are always on the lookout for stories that will make great feature documentaries. They are very difficult to finance in Canada at present and I think it’s something that we collectively as an industry need to strategize around to improve.’

The Take, produced by Lewis, Klein and the NFB, will air on CBC in March.

Barna-Alper’s long-form and serial docs have been seen around the world on such networks as History Channel UK, National Geographic International and Sundance Channel.

Early this year viewers can expect to see the much-talked-about limited series To Build a Nation, about the construction of great Canadian manmade landmarks, on History. On a similar note, Mega Builders, a new Barna-Alper series for Discovery about great engineering feats in Canada and around the world, will begin airing in April. Another title to watch for is Dark Years, looking at Depression-era Canada, as told from the perspective of Toronto Star editors and reporters of the day. This three-hour doc series will air on History and is a coproduction with the NFB.

Tufford says there are several more doc series, limited series and one-offs currently in development and early production.

While most viewers will think of gritty cop dramas when they hear the name Barna-Alper, the company continues to make documentaries a central driver of its business, a kind of Yin and Yang. O’Brien says that in many ways Barna-Alper’s lauded dramas draw from the company’s doc division and the two genres will continue to mingle under the same banner.

‘[Barna-Alper’s] success in drama evolved from our strengths in the factual format,’ says O’Brien. ‘Many of our dramas have roots in factual stories. In some cases, we have produced documentaries and dramas about the same subject matter. Great stories and great storytelling are key in both genres. Bringing these stories to Canadians is both Barna-Alper’s business and its passion.’