The National Film Board has teamed up with St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto for its Filmmaker-in-Residence initiative, which promotes the use of media and film to affect social change.

‘I call it interventionist media,’ says documentary filmmaker Katerina Cizek (Seeing is Believing, Indian Posse), who is spearheading the project on behalf of the NFB. During its course, an undetermined number of short films will be created, with Cizek directing ideas brought forth by staff and patients at St. Michael’s.

‘Rather than making a film about St. Michael’s Hospital, we’re making a film with the frontline people there,’ she adds. Gerry Flahive, Heather Frise and Silva Basmajian are the producers.

The two-year pilot project, one of the last initiatives under departing commissioner Jacques Bensimon’s watch, is a reinvention of the NFB’s Challenge for Change program from the late 1960s, which placed filmmakers and filmmaking tools in disadvantaged communities to bring social problems to the forefront. Filmmaker-in-Residence is to be completed in December 2007.

The NFB/St. Michael’s collaboration has delivered two documentary films so far – The Bicycle and The Interventionists: Chronicles of a Mental Health Crisis Team. A third collaboration with the advocacy group Young Parents No Fixed Address, which assists pregnant women and parents who need transitional housing, is underway.

In The Bicycle, a 14-minute film broadcast on CBC and Showtime in the U.S., Cizek, armed with a Sony HD camera, followed doctors affiliated with St. Michael’s to rural Africa, where she focused on one man’s efforts to deliver community-based healthcare to his village in Malawi.

‘We were working side by side,’ she says. ‘It’s not one controlling the other.’

The Bicycle was screened at the prestigious Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival in New York City on Nov. 8. The film was also shown at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto this year.

In The Interventionists, Cizek follows a St. Michael’s team comprised of a psychiatric nurse and a police officer as they respond to 911 calls involving mentally ill persons. The film had its world premiere in Toronto at the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival on Nov. 15.

The NFB will make all Filmmaker-in-Residence documentaries available for viewing on a website created for the program launching in December.

www.nfb.ca/filmmakerinresidence