The new czar at Telefilm Canada wants to cut red tape within the organization and implement new guidelines to gauge the success of homegrown movies beyond the box office.

Carolle Brabant on Tuesday made her first official appearance in English Canada since her appointment as the new executive director of the federal film funding agency in March, replacing Wayne Clarkson.

Digital convergence and its impact on the industry was top of mind for Brabant, as she spoke in Toronto of the agency’s responsibility to help the audiovisual sector deal with a current ‘groundswell of change.’

‘Digital media is beginning to shape entertainment and culture in ways we don’t fully understand yet,’ observed the chartered accountant in her speech to industry leaders and filmmakers, adding that Telefilm is in discussions with Heritage and Industry Canada to develop a national digital strategy.

New technology is also changing the way stories are delivered, and success of a homegrown film cannot be determined by its box office receipts alone, she remarked to reporters afterwards. (Telefilm’s corporate mandate has been to increase the box office for Canadian movies to 5%, a goal that it has been unable to attain).

‘[We] have to find other ways of measuring success. People are looking at cultural products on many different [screens],’ she said, admitting that the organization is in a transition period. ‘We are in a difficult period because we don’t know what the new business model will be,’ Brabant added, noting that Telefilm is not only looking for hits, but for a diversity of films. (The organization has a budget of $100 million for feature films this year).

‘Box office is not the only measure of success,’ agreed filmmaker Clement Virgo, who was in the audience. ‘A lot of films don’t make money at the box office but they make money on television, DVD, VOD. [The current] model is an old model,’ he told Playback Daily. Virgo is currently working on a feature adaptation of Lawrence Hill’s bestselling The Book of Negroes, which he hopes to shoot in Toronto, Halifax and West Africa next year.

Brabant continued to paint in broad strokes her vision for Telefilm but was short on specifics. She spoke of a desire to cut back on the amount of red tape within the organization and reduce the number of guidelines.

‘[Currently] we have one guideline for each and every program…we’re looking at reducing that so there won’t be 32 guidelines every year that have to be updated, published and promoted,’ she said.

When asked for an opinion on Alberta culture minister Lindsay Blackett’s controversial comments last week, in which he suggested that Canadian-made TV shows were ‘crap’ in a panel at the Banff World Television Festival, Brabant said she ‘totally disagrees.’

‘When I say that I’m a true fan of what we’re producing, I am. I would not be heading Telefilm if I didn’t think that the taxpayer dollars were not well invested,’ she said.