Over the past decade, Quebec has received nearly half, or 48%, of the Telefilm Canada money earmarked for feature films. This fact, recently brought to light by a few enterprising journalists at Montreal’s French-language daily La Presse, shocked some English-Canadian filmmakers. And why wouldn’t it?

Of the $665.3 million handed out to Canadian feature producers from 1999 to 2009, the Quebec industry received $319.7 million. Ontario got $183.4 million, British Columbia $83.7 million, Alberta $24 million, Saskatchewan $3.5 million and Manitoba $8.6 million.

How can Quebec, which has less than one-quarter of Canada’s population, receive nearly half of the feature funding pie?

Telefilm’s Trudeau-era inspired system to support the Canadian film industry puts la belle province at an advantage. The Canada Feature Film Fund is divided by language: two-thirds of it annually goes to English-language projects – roughly $40 million – and one-third, or about $20 million, to French-language films, most of which are made in Quebec. And the Telefilm stats reflect this: since 1999, French-language films received $239.2 million, or 35%, of CFFF money.

But La Presse’s 48% stat includes Quebec English-language projects, which can dip into Telefilm’s ‘regional production initiative,’ which divides $16 million among four regions: Quebec, the West, the Atlantic and Ontario. Quebec gets about 7% of this cash, which usually goes to first-time filmmakers or low-budget flicks. The remaining 5% of that 48% figure is likely rounded out by bigger Montreal producers, such as Park Ex Pictures (Bon Cop, Bad Cop) and Galafilm (The Blue Butterfly), which apply for cash under the English-language portion of CFFF’s national fund.

On a recent visit to Manitoba I met with a group of producers and directors. While no one disputed that French-language projects get one-third of CFFF funding, they were depressed that their community only received $8.6 million over the past decade to make features.

They were concerned about why Manitoba is producing so few features when there is a high proportion of established filmmakers in the province, including: international art-house darling Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg); Norma Bailey, who recently picked up an award from the Directors Guild of Canada for the U.S. television miniseries The Capture of the Green River Killer; Gary Yates, whose heist film High Life premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and hit theaters in January; and Noam Gonick (Stryker, Hey, Happy!), who has screened his features at MOMA and at the Berlin and Sundance film fests.

‘Manitoba has an unusually high number of interesting filmmakers for a place of its size,’ says Telefilm feature executive for the Western region John Dippong. According to Dippong, over the five-year period from 2004 to 2009, Manitobans asked CFFF for $18,826,214 and received $4,310,298. That’s a ‘success rate’ of 22%, which he says isn’t bad – it’s higher than Alberta’s (16%), but lower than B.C.’s (29%) and Saskachewan’s (26.9%). Quebec’s is roughly 25%.

Dippong says Manitoba filmmakers aren’t getting short shrift. ‘There may a perception that they are hearing ‘no’ a lot, but this is a no business. What producer wants to hear no?’

What Telefilm can’t say for sure is how many Manitoba features got made with that $8.6 million, although officials in Montreal estimate it’s roughly one every two years. (Telefilm spent $27.2 million on 21 French-language features in 2008/09 and $37.5 million on 20 English films.)

Why aren’t more people applying to Telefilm from Manitoba in the first place? Filmmakers believe the province has put more energy into attracting foreign service shoots – a sector which, as in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, has stalled in Manitoba – than developing a sustainable homegrown industry

And that’s another reason why Quebec is at an advantage. Through its cultural financing agency SODEC, the Quebec government does more for its indigenous industry than any other province in the country.

In 2007, Quebec’s Liberal government increased SODEC’s budget by $10 million to $24 million annually after a group of high-profile filmmakers were refused funding by Telefilm. This boost allowed six films to go into production that perhaps would never have been made otherwise – or at least that’s what producers in the province threatened (regional filmmakers could take lessons from the Quebec industry, which has perfected the art of outraged lobbying).

Of course, filmmakers in Toronto and Quebec also have a natural advantage: they are close to broadcasters, federal funders, policy makers and distributors – and without a distributor one can’t get production money from Telefilm.

‘There are access issues. But that’s the nature of the system. I don’t think it’s due to that. We are looking for interesting films and directors to support, ones that will ultimately make bigger films and more money,’ says Dippong. ‘Our primary goal is box office.’

Perhaps Telefilm’s rather single-minded pursuit of bums in seats is part of the problem, and not just for Manitoba filmmakers. Telefilm is desperately searching for the next Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg, because it’s these types of fellows, it believes, who are the most likely to fulfill the agency’s overall objective: a box office of 5% for domestic films. (That number fell to 2.9% in 2008/09 from 3.3.% the year before.)

According to this theory of film funding, Telefilm bureaucrats must be on the hunt for more commercial, clearly identifiable genre flicks that audiences are more likely to ‘get,’ and therefore want to see. Not the kind of films Manitoba filmmakers Gonick or Maddin make. Yet Maddin’s singular world view – yes, I know it’s very, very strange – has put Winnipeg on the international map. Measuring the success of films by ticket sales in an industry that for numerous reasons fails miserably at the box office seems pointless. With such a narrow objective, Telefilm risks trying to reproduce, like an envious cousin, the American films that most Canadians tend to see in theaters.

Why not relax a bit about that unattainable 5% and take a few risks? Who would have guessed that a $600,000 film from a 19-year-old first-time screenwriter would wow international audiences at the Cannes Film Festival? Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère did just that. And it was also a box-office success – it pulled in almost $1 million on only two screens.

Part of the reason the Quebec industry ticks along is that both artistic and populist films are viewed as essential components of a healthy industry. And while Telefilm’s box-office objectives are the same in Quebec as elsewhere, SODEC often picks up the slack when it comes to the more artistic films. SODEC helped out Dolan in the post-production phase.

There is talk that Manitoba may soon develop a new strategy to support its homegrown industry. Let’s hope stakeholders come up with a plan that’s sustainable in the long term. I’m sure there’s a way to better support directors such as Maddin and discover the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the hit U.S. flick, which, of course, was created by former Winnipeger Nia Vardalos.