There’s no bigger cheerleader for Canadian production than Norman Jewison. He was reading through his morning newspaper recently, he told me, when an item caught his attention. It was an article about how Rhombus Media producer Niv Fichman crisscrossed the globe in order to secure the movie rights to Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, which goes to camera in Ontario in late July with an eye to a spring 2008 release.

‘I thought, ‘Isn’t this great?” Jewison said. ‘He got on a plane and he flew to Portugal and he sat down with this guy and he got the rights. Now that is smart! That is what David Wolper does. That’s what American producers do. This is where I’m encouraged.’

It took Fichman and Don McKellar two days to close the deal face-to-face with Saramago back in 1999. At the time, many suitors had come and gone, and it was unlikely that the reclusive author would ever give up the rights. So how did they set themselves apart from the rest? Producers in this country should take note.

‘We said, ‘Well, we’re Canadian.’ I flew the Rhombus cultural flag and knew that he was a staunch communist,’ recalls Fichman. ‘So we sent him all our commie films: [films about] Shostakovich, Hanns Eisler, all of our marching songs. Because of our gentle persistence, after a while we got this call and [his agent] said ‘He’ll see you in Lanzarote [in the Canary Islands].”

Fichman is without question the hottest producer in the country right now. In addition to the $25-million Japan/Brazil/Canada copro Blindness, there’s François Girard’s $25-million Japan/France/Canada epic Silk, with Keira Knightley and Callum Keith Rennie, which will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival before going into theaters day and date in the U.K., France, Canada and U.S. (through Picture House Entertainment).

If that isn’t enough, Fichman has secured the necessary financing for Paul Gross’ $19-million First World War drama Passchendaele, inspired by the wartime experiences of Gross’ grandfather, an infantry soldier with the 10th Battalion out of Alberta. It’s now casting for an Aug. 13 start date, and while it took two solid years of fundraising, all the money for the ‘shamelessly Canadian’ story came from Canada.

‘I’m sure it’s the most money that’s ever been raised domestically for a film,’ Fichman says proudly, rhyming off the various sources of funding: government of Alberta, private investors, corporate donations, charitable donations, Telefilm Canada and tax credits.

‘The magic formula is that there is no magic formula,’ Fichman says, when asked how he’s managed to orchestrate three major projects into production in such quick succession. But one of the ingredients may be his willingness to go to the ends of the earth to find his budget. He estimates that he’s made more than 60 trips to Japan alone over the past few years.

‘I still get a little buzz every time I get on a plane, I won’t lie,’ he says. ‘It amazes me that you get in that little tube and you wake up in another part of the world. I love working with other cultures and finding out how things are done. It can often be frustrating, but it’s so fantastically thrilling in the end.’

Fifteen years ago, Fichman developed a relationship with Sonoko Sakai, a film buyer with Nippon Herald in Japan. Although he says she rejected every film he brought to her, she loved the concept of Silk, eventually joining as a producer and raising money from Japanese investors.

Whereas Silk can define itself as a French adventure in Japan with a Canadian viewpoint, one of the conditions set by Saramago requires that Blindness be set nowhere recognizable. McKellar worked on the screenplay for six years with the intention of directing it himself, but soon he and Fichman saw another possibility.

‘We both realized that the ambition that we had for the project would be better realized if we were to get a director with the stature to pull actors and financing at a different level than we could ourselves here in Canada,’ observes Fichman.

Sakai read and liked McKellar’s script and was sold when director Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardner) – who had gone after the rights to the novel himself – joined the movie. She went back to her investors and they committed to another Fichman film.

As a result, Japan could open the door to other ambitious producers. ‘[Japan is] trying to be more flexible,’ he says, citing the emergence of what are termed ‘financial coproductions.’ ‘You can get money from a country and they can get some say in the production, but not necessarily have to spend the money in that country.’

So are Canuck producers finally following Robert Lantos’ lead and thinking beyond our borders?

‘We have the confidence to go and do it,’ says Fichman. ‘Or maybe it’s that we’re not satisfied with what we have here. The industry is so much more global, and becoming more so every day. In the last 15 or 20 years it’s moved in that direction. We’re really well placed because we’ve been doing coproductions for so long.’

Fichman notes that he was part of a Spotlight on Canada panel at Cannes this past May with four other producers – including Denise Robert, Julia Sereny, Shawn Williamson, and Liz Jarvis. After listening to his colleagues, he realized something.

‘Anyone who sat in that audience would have been impressed. I was proud of all of us,’ he says, citing the national makeup of the panel. ‘If you had a French panel, they’d all be from Paris. If you had a British panel, they’d all be from London. And the American panel would be either from New York or L.A. But a Canadian panel was from Winnipeg, Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. We’re all doing incredible work in the field of coproduction. It’s a Canadian thing.’

Jewison, who is waiting on financing for his next film, recalled something that famed director John Huston was fond of saying to him when the topic of money comes up: ‘Well, Norman. It’s just as hard to make the last one as it was the first one.’

At the moment, Fichman is making both the last one and the next one look like a walk in the park.