When Nova Scotia-raised writer-director Ashley McKenzie and fellow producer Nelson MacDonald were planning their first feature a decade ago, they weren’t sure whether the Telefilm system would fit their model of filmmaking. Then the federal funder launched the Micro-Budget Production Program, supported by the Talent Fund, and the duo became intrigued.

“It felt like the answer to what we were looking for, because you’re able to combine Micro-Budget funding with Canada Council funding,” McKenzie (pictured right) recalls, noting they closed financing for their $250,000 budget feature with about $125,000 from the program alongside $60,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and support from the provincial tax incentive program. “It felt a bit unprecedented to get Telefilm and Canada Council working together.”

That film was 2016’s Werewolf (pictured above), one of many award-winning first-time features that have come out of what’s now called the Talent to Watch program, which has evolved as much as the careers of its participants have over the years.

Now into its 10th year, the Talent Fund is supported through private donations from individuals, Canadian companies and industry partners. Current supporters include Royal Bank, the National Bank of Canada and CIBC. Previous partners have included Bell Media and Corus Entertainment.

The fund was “a groundbreaking moment” when it launched with a budget of $1 million in March 2012, says Francesca Accinelli (pictured left), Telefilm Canada’s interim executive director and CEO. Back then, Telefilm wanted to diversify its funding without being reliant on Heritage amid federal budget cuts that had led to layoffs, while also changing the narrative around access to the funder, she says.

Using the Talent Fund and the then-Micro-Budget program together allowed Telefilm to spend more time discovering new talent and ensure private companies and philanthropists “saw the importance of making sure that the next generation had a place in the industry, while also not taxing Telefilm’s budget in terms of all those second, third, fourth features.” The fund has since raised $17 million and subsidized more than 100 films in every province and territory except for Nunavut.

Other award-winning films that have come out of the program and been distributed in other territories include Kirsten Carthew’s 2016 Northwest Territories-shot coming-of-age story The Sun at Midnight; Phil Connell’s 2020 LGBTQ family drama Jump, Darling (pictured right); 2021 drama Learn to Swim by Thyrone Tommy; and Chase Joynt’s innovative doc Framing Agnes, among many others.

Now the focus is on nurturing and increasing the Talent Fund’s investment pool, and seeking contributions from donors to support the mentorship side, says Accinelli.

“At 10 years, we have to say, ‘What’s that next iteration?'” she says, adding that the “focus as we move forward will be spending much more time with those benefactors, for lack of a better word,” through experiential things like attending a film festival with the fund recipients.

“We have a couple of long-standing contributors who are ready to start making greater contributions, so I’m hoping as we get into the late fall, we’ll be able to make some announcements,” Accinelli adds.

Talent to Watch has gone through many iterations already, after criticism that not enough funding was being provided, not enough underrepresented directors were chosen, and that the eligibility process wasn’t accessible enough. The original Micro-Budget offered around $125,000 and determined recipients through a selection committee that made recommendations based on talent nominations from the film institutions Telefilm worked with.

In November 2017, the program was rebranded to Talent to Watch and implemented changes such as the added eligibility of short filmmakers who had won a prize at select international festivals. Helping advise on the changes were Zapruder Films’ Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller, who became ambassadors for the program.

August 2020 saw the maximum amount of funds available to each project increased to $150,000. That shot up to $250,000 for fiction feature films and remained at $150,000 for documentaries in September 2021, after Telefilm conducted pan-Canadian consultations.

Other changes included doubling the production budget maximum to $500,000, and the introduction of a new Filmmaker Apply-Direct Stream for underrepresented filmmakers as well as a new mentorship program administered by the National Screen Institute and the National Institute of Image and Sound.

The changes are having the desired impact.

Toronto-based writer-director-producer Martin Edralin (pictured right) didn’t go to film school and therefore didn’t have access to Talent to Watch until the eligibility doors widened, enabling him to qualify when his short film Hole screened at several festivals. He got $125,000 to make his debut feature, Islands , for which he also had arts council funding of around $100,000, laddering up to a production budget of $230,000.

The program “makes it a lot easier for people to get their feet wet in feature filmmaking,” Edralin says. “I know there are complaints that it’s not a lot of money, but it was money that wasn’t available before in Canada, and it was money I didn’t have access to prior.”

That sentiment is echoed by Pascal Plante, who got around $130,000 from the program in 2016 for Fake Tattoos, made with a roughly $250,000 budget. “It was huge, because even though it might not sound like a lot of money, it’s infinitely better than a self-financed film,” he says. “Just the fact that it is an official program makes it more legitimate, especially with distributors, because that’s really what’s at stake here. You don’t want to make a first feature that ends up being anonymous.”

Writer-director Jasmin Mozaffari and producer Caitlin Grabham got $125,000 in Talent Fund support through the Micro-Budget Production Program in 2016 for Firecrackers when their alma mater, Toronto Metropolitan University, nominated them. Mozaffari (pictured left) says their film’s budget was $250,000 and making up the difference was difficult, so she’s happy the program offers more funding now.

“For your first feature that might sound like a lot to some people, but it’s really not because you want to pay people properly, and we couldn’t,” she says, noting crew members took a pay cut on the film and the actors were non-union. She reinvested her fee into the award-winning film and didn’t get paid until years later when they recouped some of the money in film sales.

Mozaffari praises the program for starting careers and offering creative freedom, adding “it’s one of the only programs probably in the world that allows first feature filmmakers to get this chunk of money and run with it.”

McKenzie says Talent to Watch funding can be 100% of a film’s financing, which is “a really powerful detail, because you can get that funding and you can just go make your film.”

“One of the reasons why the most interesting films coming out of the country in the past 10 years have been Micro-Budget films is because your hands aren’t tied as much and it allows for more risky films to be made, different perspectives to come to the table,” says McKenzie (pictured left).

“I think there are steps that need to follow [for Telefilm] so that all the filmmakers that are getting to make their first feature don’t get stuck trying to make their next film,” she adds. “But it was a pretty big shift in the filmmaking landscape.”

Accinelli says the Talent Fund is using the 10th anniversary as “this moment of really shifting,” adding that the phasing out of the Bell Media and Corus Entertainment benefits took a toll on the fund. “Ideally, we would want to be bringing in $1 million to $2 million a year in funding to be able to, as much as possible, offset the Talent to Watch program.”

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s Fall 2022 issue