Canada has a vibrant internal exhibition market patronized by sophisticated cinema-goers, but the challenge for its filmmakers remains making movies that travel beyond our borders.

That assessment came Tuesday from indie movie guru Mark Gill as he held court at the Toronto International Film Festival during the Ernst & Young/Heenan Blaikie LLP media round table at the Park Hyatt hotel.

‘The challenge has been finding Canadian movies with stories that can make their way around the globe,’ argued Gill, who held distribution posts at Miramax and Warner Independent Pictures before becoming CEO of The Film Department.

He pointed to periodic breakthroughs, like Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, but added there were too few to register with international buyers.

‘A lot of the Canadian films seem to have a subject matter that’s interesting in Canada, and harder to relate to if out of Canada,’ Gill concluded.

The need for Canadian producers to reach beyond the home market for financing and audience attention was underlined by Gill and his fellow panelists as they pointed to hard times for indie movies amid failing specialty distributors and a glut of product in the market.

‘They just have to be good ones,’ Gill said of indie movies looking to break through at the multiplex otherwise dominated by tentpole Hollywood releases.

Paul Gross, the writer, producer, director and star of Passchendaele, said the Canadian movie industry remains Byzantine and opaque.

‘It would make the Doges of Venice jealous,’ he said of the Canadian film financing scene, where producers generally tap out domestic sources at around $7 million and then need to travel the globe to fill out budgets.

Gross said he and fellow producer Niv Fichman managed to finance Passchendaele fully in Canada only by picking the pockets of wealthy donors, including the Alberta government of former premier Ralph Klein.

‘To make Passchendaele, we had to trick rich people to give us money. I wish I would have had a digital camera with me. The film would be called My Lunches with Billionaires,’ Gross told the panel.

Entertainment One CEO Darren Throop sounded a more optimistic note by telling producers and distributors that they could thrive in the future if they followed his lead and diversified away from film distribution onto emerging digital platforms.

‘From our point of view, it’s about rights management. We want to attach ourselves to good movie, music and entertainment rights, and we want a solid infrastructure that we can largely monetize in many territories,’ Throop told the festival panel.

‘The entertainment business continues to grow, if you consolidate all the channels,’ he added.