Digital technology that enables new storytelling techniques, including cross-platform media, will help assure the future of the National Film Board through 2012, the public filmmaker said Tuesday as it unveiled its latest strategic plan.

NFB chairman Tom Perlmutter said the public filmmaker will continue to produce social-issue documentaries, auteur animation, alternative dramas and digital content as it embraces the digital age. The plan also promises that the NFB will produce or coproduce five to 10 theatrical documentaries annually.

And while the NFB has no funding for feature films, it will back five to 10 ‘low budget, unscripted, improvised drama’ projects over the next five years.

The NFB also remains committed to short-form auteur animation, and will experiment in stereoscopic animation. Also on the digital front, the public filmmaker will adapt its production and distribution efforts to high definition.

Other strategic objectives include making NFB product more accessible, increasing ‘creative innovation’ and putting the public producer on a ‘sound financial basis.’

Perlmutter argued that emerging cross-platform media will enable the NFB to go beyond reflecting Canada back to itself in traditional formats to engaging Canadians and bringing about social change.

‘It’s not simply ‘Here’s the mirror, this is who we are.’ We’re talking about pushing the imaginative engagement with Canadians in ways that it would be harder to do in the private sector or the pure broadcast medium,’ he told Playback Daily.

Practically speaking, Perlmutter pointed to an award-winning NFB documentary by Katerina Cizek in which she joined front-line health care workers at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto to come up with new ways to deliver medical care in the inner city.

Accompanying the documentary is a website (www.nfb.ca/filmmakerinresidence/) that takes viewers on Cizek’s filmmaking journey.

Similarly, another NFB film, Nettie Wild’s Bevel Up: Drugs, Users and Outreach Nursing, includes a 45-minute documentary on drug use in downtown Vancouver that provides the core for a four-hour interactive teaching DVD for use by student nurses and seasoned professionals that care for drug-users.

The strategic plan does underline, however, ‘pressing capital needs’ for the NFB to meet its mandate in the digital age.

Perlmutter said that the board ‘will do with what we already have’ before asking Ottawa for added financing.