It was February of 1979, a Trudeau held the highest position in Canadian politics and Barbara Willis Sweete was co-founding a production company with Niv Fichman. Joined a year later by the third founding partner Larry Weinstein, Rhombus Media would go on to become one of Canada’s most successful and long-lasting production companies.

Thirty-six years later, there’s a Trudeau in office again and Willis Sweete is once again on the ground level of a new production company.

Joined by producers Trinni Franke and Susanne Ritzau, Willis Sweete Productions has been operating since May of this year, with the aim of producing alternative storytelling via non-traditional funding mechanisms.

The company currently has four projects at various stages of production and development.

The first, currently in post-production, is a multi-screen silent dance movie about Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra. The film is financed entirely by the orchestra, and is set to premiere at the National Arts centre in January 2016. The second is a documentary on the Bata Shoe Empire, and uses the history of shoes as a doorway into various cultures. Shooting on the feature is ongoing, with private sponsorship and a distributor attached. Also in development are two more features, for which the prodco has optioned the rights to a book and a script.

Earlier this year, Willis Sweete Productions also produced a feature entitled Year of the Sheep, a classical music-based film showing how the great concert halls in North America have embraced Chinese new year as part of their culture. Set at the Lincoln Centre in New York and the Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, the film was financed entirely by a Chinese corporate sponsor.

With the company still in its first year of operation, Willis Sweete says the plan is to keep the overhead low and work within low budgets. On the feature film side, the company will work within a $1.5-to-$2 million budget range, while the maximum for documentaries will be $1 million.

But before Willis Sweete could get to the point of launching her company, there remained the enormous task of untangling the web of 36 years of Rhombus involvement. With the three partners busy working on separate projects, finding the time to formalize the split was lengthy process.

Earlier this year the paperwork was finalized, leaving Willis Sweete, Weinstein and Fichman free to go their separate ways, each taking the projects they directed during their tenures at Rhombus.

There was no animosity involved in the split, emphasizes Willis Sweete – the time had simply come for each party to go in their respective directions. “The synergy with which Rhombus began lasted decades. But it started to go a bit lopsided when each of us started working separately on projects that were completely unrelated – in different genres and on vastly divergent budget levels,” she told Playback Daily.

The three original Rhombus members initially bonded over a love of music, and the company cut its teeth as a performing arts specialist. “When we stopped identifying ourselves as a performing arts specialist… our reasons for being together gradually reduced.”

For Willis Sweete, the prospect of starting all over again is just as exciting to her as it was in 1979.

“That feeling of freedom and weightlessness, maybe I lost that a bit over the years at Rhombus, and it was nobody’s fault – just directing my projects and letting the years go on. It feels great to be out in the world and facing things on my own,” she said.

“There’s got to be way to balance the passion and love for the art, and the funding. That’s what I’m searching for – it’s like a scale where the passion and the dollars have to be in balance.”