BANFF: On the surface, it’s totally crazy. The loonie’s at par, the writers strike was a body blow to last season and this year’s upfronts, and the Yanks are sinking into a horrendous economic downturn. But checking out the buzz at the Banff World Television Festival this year, there seems to be an alignment of the stars that holds great promise for the Canadian industry – or at least for certain forward-thinking and internationally minded producers.

Take David Paperny. ‘The writers strike was great for us,’ he says.

Paperny Films happened to have two series premiere during the strike’s darkest days. It probably was not a coincidence that its reality show The Week the Women Went pulled down a million viewers on CBC and its Jet Stream was one of Discovery Canada’s highest-rated programs.

These are brisk times for the Vancouver prodco, which recently announced it is branching into scripted programming and appointed Erin Haskett, formerly of Infinity Features, to head things up. Paperny acknowledges that the benefits packages that are the legacy of the Alliance Atlantis takeover and the CHUM breakup had something to do with it.

‘There’s $100 million swishing around in the next three to four years that’s earmarked for drama,’ Paperny notes. The company pitched three scripted projects at Banff: Cruel But Necessary, with Saul Rubinek; an adaptation of Richard Wagamese’s Ragged Company; and Paperny is even looking to go into sci-fi – something Vancouver crews know a thing or two about – working with comic-book-artist-turned-filmmaker Kaare Andrews.

And then there’s Cathy Malatesta, an L.A.-based international copro specialist who, along with partner Bryan Taw, recently teamed up with Toronto producers Phyllis Platt and Kathy Slevin (whose brother is Paul Haggis) to develop and produce scripted series. Malatesta’s interest in Canada is on account of all of the international copro treaties we offer that the U.S. never thought to get around to.

‘Canada is the gateway to Europe and Asia,’ she says. She had with her in Banff a fat file containing 4,000 literary titles she is developing on behalf of Michael Douglas’ Further Films and the Boston-based investment firm CP Baker & Company. She’s whittled it down to ‘the 30 most interesting things that will translate globally.’ She’s on the lookout for international partners.

Malatesta acknowledges that American producers and networks have tended to be somewhat insular, but she believes that mother necessity is changing all that. A downturn in the U.S. economy and deficits at the networks stateside are forcing Americans to think abroad more than ever.

‘The paradigm is changing,’ she says. ‘U.S. broadcasters are looking for ways to mitigate deficits, and you have to think outside the box and look outside the box.’

And while she says the partnerships in which she specializes continue to be somewhat akin to pushing a rock up a hill, ‘collaboration is the word of the moment.’

Malatesta has several projects she hopes to move forward at Banff. They include: half-hour live-action and CGI comedy series Pandora’s Closet; Fairy Godmother, based on the work of noted author Shirley Jackson, which Malatesta’s pitching in the U.S. and Europe; and Payback, a one-hour adventure series developed by Platt and Slevin.

And then there’s producer Morgan Elliott of Suddenly SeeMore…Productions in Dundas, ON, who, out of the blue in November got a call from Howie Mandel’s Alevy Productions, asking her if she’d like to discuss producing Mandel’s latest project for Global and NBC, Howie Do It.

Elliott believes her name came up because of her work on Second City’s Next Comedy Legend and No Opportunity Wasted, but the show came to Canada for several reasons. Ex-pat Mandel wanted to come home – ‘This is a dream for him,’ she says – and the current economy paired with the at-par dollar has motivated NBC to make it a 10-out-of-10 Canadian content show as opposed to a service job. And perhaps most significantly, NBC trusts Global and believes in Canada’s production infrastructure well enough to relinquish control. ‘We’re really clever with our budgets, even though theirs have more zeros’ she says.

Suddenly SeeMore is also filming the 10 x 30 travel adventure series Stratusphere with seven-time WWF champ Trish Stratus, which hits the small screen this fall on Travel & Escape and in the U.S. on Discovery HD. That project was sparked by a quick chat in the Banff delegate lounge last year with CTV’s Bruce Cowley that Elliott says started with, ‘Hey Bruce, I hear you’ve got money.’

Meanwhile, Vancouver director/producer Martin Wood is using what he learned about the West Coast sci-fi scene – and particularly through working on Stargate SG-1 – to get the ball rolling on his series Sanctuary, which is unique in that it was made for online with a huge budget – $3.5 million for eight 15- to 20-minute webisodes – and it was funded by a construction company, The Beedie Group.

‘Canada has all the people it needs to be able to make the shows that are on the air now,’ he says. ‘We need studios with deep pockets, but we don’t have studios. So we went to a construction group that believes in us.’

Hindsight has taught Wood a thing or two about why he was unable to monetize the series’ online kick at the can, but more importantly, he’s managed to leverage his experience and the Sanctuary franchise to bring it to traditional broadcast. He has presold a new version of Sanctuary globally, and with a top-up from The Beedie Group, the 13-part series will air in North America on The Movie Network, Movie Central and the Sci-Fi Channel starting in October. (The show is created by Damian Kindler and stars Amanda Tapping.)

His goal, he says, is to take it back to the web, and to do it right this time. ‘Nothing like this budget has ever come out of Canada without a studio,’ says Wood. ‘The magnitude of this deal has us waking up screaming every day.’

Remember when some got faint at the prospect of an 80-cent greenback? You Chicken Littles can relax now. SARS, Mad Cow Disease, the buck-at-par, the digital media invasion, strikes past and future, and now recession. The sky has, in fact, fallen. And we’re still here. In fact, some are thriving. Or, as Alexander Graham Bell put it, ‘When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.’ Let’s keep looking for those open doors.