The new Canada Media Fund is ready to hand out $3.5 million to 21 Canadian documentary filmmakers, but there’s a major hitch: many can’t find the broadcasters they need to get access to the cash.

”Broadcasters don’t want POV docs anymore. If it’s not Battle of the Blades, they aren’t interested,” Montreal-based producer Frederic Bohbot (Bunbury Films) told Playback.

Bohbot has access to $250,000 if he can get 20% of that amount in broadcast license fees by mid-December. He hasn’t been able to find anyone to sign on. Although he’s confident his project will ultimately get made, he believes ”it’s time to get out of documentary filmmaking.”

The CMF English POV program was set up to give documentary filmmakers a helping hand in a media environment that is making it increasingly challenging for them to practice their craft. Broadcast channels are collapsing and changing their business models at an alarming rate, and airing single-story documentaries just aren’t a priority for most decision makers worried about declining ratings and advertising revenues.

Broadcasters now prefer series – films that stretch out over 12 episodes – or current affairs pieces. While investigative series such as CTV’s W5 and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate still exist, slots are getting harder to come by and last July the CBC canceled one of its only venues for POV docs, The Lens.

”We are aware of the problem. Telefilm is following this on a daily basis,” the CMF’s Stephane Cardin told Playback Daily while he was conducting consultations on the fund in Montreal. ”All I can say is that we are on it and we are working with applicants to find solutions.”

The English POV program, which only exists for English-language projects, was set up in consultation with the industry, says Cardin. ”This first round is a bit of a test, but we are doing our best to make it work.”

Montreal-based filmmaker Tamas Wormser’s multi-platform project about Jewish music around the world, Wandering Muse (pictured) has been earmarked by CMF for roughly $500,000 in funding. Like Bohbot, Wormser also can’t find a broadcaster.

Like all applicants to the POV program, Wormser’s project was required to have a significant web component. But the filmmaker has discovered that there’s a gap between the fund’s new media vision and the needs of conventional broadcasters.

”They don’t care about the website. They aren’t equipped to deal with it.’

DOC Canada spokeswoman Liza Fitzgibbons believes the problems facing documentary filmmakers could suggest that the fund is ill-conceived.

”The CMF are saddled with policy directives which are hard to reconcile. Documentary makers are like the canary in the mine for the whole fund.”

Fitzgibbons believes the fund’s web content exigencies favor large companies who have the resources to manage both web and the broadcast components.

”[But] it is a new fund. We have to give it time,” says Fitzgibbons, who also believes broadcasters need to take the lead and start broadcasting more auteur docs.

”There is a market for them. Theatrical docs are popular, people attend doc festivals in droves. [But] what will it take for the powers that be to figure out this fund doesn’t work for some sectors? Is it going to take the collapse of the documentary film industry?”