On Dec. 17, Jacques Bensimon will walk out the front door of the National Film Board’s offices in Montreal, ending a five-year run as commissioner during which he – and, he is quick to remind, his staff and colleagues – have pulled the dear old board back from the brink of oblivion.

Is he happy? Sad? Ready for a trip to the spa?

‘I’m relieved,’ he says, unapologetically, on the phone from the Sithengi Film and Television Market in South Africa. ‘It’s like walking out of military service and going back to civilian life. It was an amazing task to take on. I knew it wouldn’t be easy.’

Indeed, it wasn’t. When the former filmmaker took on the job in July 2001, the NFB was on the ropes, still reeling from a series of devastating federal cuts that took $26 million – 32% of its annual budget – between 1994 and 1998. The 66-year-old board had been set up with a seemingly impossible task: reinvent itself with no new funding, little support from other agencies, and a slipping public profile.

‘The morale at that point was just terrible,’ he recalls. ‘The cuts were still in close memory. They had gotten rid of the lab, the shooting stage, and most of the staff filmmakers.’

Five years later, the NFB’s profile is back up. It netted its twelfth Oscar in 2005 for Chris Landreth’s inspired animated short Ryan and marked its return to scripted features with the success of its 2001 coproduction Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner by Zacharias Kunuk. And then there was its return in 2003 to feature distribution – it did well with Joseph Blasioli’s The Last Round: Chuvalo vs. Ali – and the opening of a high-tech storefront location in downtown Toronto.

‘As an ex-NFBer, when I came in, I had very strong ideas about what I wanted to do,’ he says. ‘But I think my main objective was, as corny as it sounds, to be faithful to the spirit that [original commissioner John] Grierson had founded the NFB on.’ That is, to produce, distribute and promote films about Canada.

Bensimon, 63, says guiding the NFB during these crucial years was a high-wire act of Cirque du Soleil proportions. He needed to reach back to the board’s early glory days while moving forward technologically, so as to avoid being left behind by the changes that were happening faster than anyone expected.

His staff and stakeholders appear to be happy with the results.

‘There is no question about it: the situation now, as opposed to when Jacques started, is like night and day,’ says one NFB bureaucrat, speaking on condition of anonymity, who has worked there for more than 15 years. ‘The staff has morale, [and] there is a connection with the public.’

The board employs 460 people in its offices across Canada.

Filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, who won a Genie in 2004 for his NFB copro ScaredSacred, agrees that the board ‘has been completely revitalized.’

‘Things were moribund in 2001. The place needed an overhaul. One of the things that Jacques did early on was to travel across the country and meet with filmmakers face to face, to see what we felt needed to be done. It was clear he was very open to feedback,’ says Ripper.

Bensimon operated with one basic tenet in mind: transparency.

‘I didn’t want anyone to think there were hidden agendas, or that we were operating from some mandate we’d been sent in with from the government,’ he says. ‘This had to be about the creative process first. The creators had to be driving things.’

He also did a number of practical things, such as streamlining departments that had operated like a series of silos, each in isolation. Marketing and distribution, for example, had been divided into three divisions for English, French and international. Bensimon and his team integrated them into one office.

He is also the first to concede that there have been disappointments.

‘We never got any new financing from the government,’ he laments. ‘If you add together all of the money that is requested and that finances the audiovisual industries in our country, we are still very poor compared to other countries in the world.’

But lobbying, he points out, isn’t easy. ‘During my tenure I’ve known four ministers [of Canadian Heritage] in five years,’ he remarks. ‘The minute you convince them, they’re gone.’

He also says it was ‘a major, major mistake’ that the NFB did not get a broadcast licence, for which it applied in the ’80s. ‘In my opinion, this was a major injustice,’ he adds.

A channel of its own would be a great asset to the board, which sometimes has trouble getting its titles played on CBC, even though the two would appear to be natural allies.

‘Our relationship with the CBC has been a love-hate one,’ Bensimon admits. ‘We have a social mandate – theirs is more of an objective, journalistic one.’

And more social issue docs are on the way. The NFB has recently gone back to its roots by backing docs such as Joshua Dorsey’s The Point, about Montreal street kids, and Craig Chivers’ No Place Called Home, about a working poor family in Ontario. In 2004, it tapped Katerina Cizek for a filmmaker in residence program at a Toronto hospital, unveiled earlier this month (see story, p. 12).

‘Now, 85% of the films made at the board are on social issues. This has been quite an accomplishment, because it was giving back to this organization its pertinence within the overall landscape,’ says Bensimon.

Initiatives involving minorities such as aboriginals and the disabled are particular points of pride.

‘Being born in Morocco and raised in Canada, I feel that diversity is one of our strengths. It’s imperative that native people and the disabled get to have their voices heard. To me, one of the principal strengths of the NFB was to give voice to the voiceless,’ he says, similar to Challenge for Change, the NFB’s series of social issue films in the ’60s.

‘The NFB really is a kind of compass. To a certain extent, it’s something that brings back an equilibrium. It’s at its best when it’s experimental and innovative, and when it’s doing something that the rest of the industry can’t do on its own.’

Bensimon is ‘very much involved’ in the selection process for his replacement, which is currently in the early stages. The NFB will make a recommendation to Heritage and could see a new commissioner in place by the end of the year.

His advice to his successor?

‘We are going to need to reflect on the profound technological changes that are happening. Our industry is still locked up in the old prototype and model. If I came out of this five years with anything, it’s that we have to rethink how we distribute our films, how we put the creative process forward, how we go about coproducing with international partners.

‘We’re going to have to rethink things entirely. Borders no longer have meaning. The CRTC isn’t going to be able to regulate them. The world is ours – it’s ours to be taken, but it’s also ours to be consumed. If we’re not careful, we could be losing an incredibly important vision of a society, and that’s our Canadian society. We need to maintain our ability to espouse those values, while developing new approaches to filmmaking.’

www.nfb.ca