Montreal: A revitalized National Film Board and its new senior management team recently completed a five-city Preview 2002 tour, highlighting this season’s English Program lineup of more than 40 new documentaries, animated shorts, youth programs and interactive productions originating from six production centres.

English Program director-general Tom Perlmutter says the board has an unique role in the increasingly globalized film industry, ‘a kind of cultural conscience for the country and a Canadian beacon’ for films outside the industrial mainstream ‘that explore key social issues and give a voice to underrepresented points of view.’

New releases from aboriginal directors include Alanis Obomsawin’s feature-length doc Is the Crown at War with Us? (working title), an exploration into the causes of conflict and prejudice in the New Brunswick fishing communities; Gregory Coyes’ How the Fiddle Flows, a spirited journey set to the music of Metis fiddlers and dancers coproduced with Streaming Fiddles Media and commissioned by Bravo!; and Cathy Martin’s profile of the life and mysterious death of Nova Scotia Mik’maq rights activist Anne Mae Aquash.

Doc highlights

Preview 2002 doc highlights include Learning Peace: A Big School with a Big Heart, the second in Teresa MacInnes’ three-part series on dealing with bullying in school; Fire in their Eyes, Ole Gjerstad’s inside look at the world of the Doukhobors, a feature-length doc slated for release this fall and scripted with Janice Benthin; and To My Birthmother, Oscar winner Beverly Shaffer’s topical portrait of one woman’s search for her biological mother.

One of the country’s top drama directors, John N. Smith (The Boys of St. Vincent, Random Passage), returns to his NFB roots with Offstage, Onstage: Inside the Stratford Festival, a brilliantly informed feature-length doc marking the Shakespearean festival’s 50th anniversary, and presold to CBC.

Joe Blasioli’s Chuvalo is a look-back at the historic fight with Muhammad Ali, the ‘Battle of Toronto,’ in March 1966. It has been presold to CBC.

Murray Battle’s The Next Big Thing is an introduction to six Canadian comics on the verge, while Moira Simpson’s Kosovo Dreams (working title) looks at how a Vancouver lawyer and mom is helping bring democracy to war-torn Kosovo. Director/writer Barbara Doran’s two-hour investigative doc Homicide looks at the dark side of human nature and asks what makes a killer. Homicide will be broadcast on CBC’s The Nature of Things in early spring 2003.

Reel Diversity and youth

New NFB films by directors of color include Jari Osborne’s Asahi Baseball, a one-hour doc about a team of barrier-breaking Japanese-Canadian ball players in WWII, slated for a March 2003 release, and 645 Wellington, 2001 Reel Diversity winner Kaveh Nabatian’s offbeat look at impoverished Montreal artists battling commercial developers.

Winners of this year’s expanded national Reel Diversity production grants will be announced at the Banff Television Festival, June 9-14.

NFB production for youth includes Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, a stylish, gritty teen drama on the subject of sexual exploitation, starring Allie Mickelson, directed by Cliff Shelton and written by Susan Musgrave and Cliff Skelton.

The bilingual NFB website Mediasphere features director Kevin Kee’s timely interactive production The Cyber-Terrorism Crisis: Liberty vs. Security, while Contemporary Canada, an interactive Canadian media/history catalogue features texts and clips sourced from more than 200 NFB titles.

Animation delights

NFB animated shorts continue to delight and win international acclaim, the latest being Cordell Barker’s Oscar-nominated Strange Invaders. Upcoming animation includes the Canada/Holland coproduction Stiltwalkers, a 2D/3D surreal sea-world journey from director Sjaak Meilink, and Roses Sing on New Snow, Shanghai expat director Yuan Zhang’s touching short story of a brave little girl that combines drawings on paper with computer rendering. The film is the latest in the board’s Talespinners collection for children aged five to nine. Sheldon Cohen, director of the classic Canadiana short The Sweater, returns with a touchingly funny look at children’s hopes and dreams in the 12-minute short I Want a Dog.

Elizabeth Portman’s 10-minute drawings-on-paper/computer-rendered short Fair Phyllis is set in an 18th century pastoral countryside and celebrates the resiliency of woman.

A glimpse at NFB French Program highlights under newly named director-general Andre Picard reveals Patrick Bouchard’s mad, high-octane puppet animation Les Ramoneurs cerebraux/The Brainwashers; director Pierre Sidaoui’s poetic meditation on his native Lebanon; and the Paule Baillargeon doc Claude Jutra: An Unfinished Story, an intimate feature-length look at the legendary Quebec filmmaker (Kamouraska, Mon oncle Antoine), scripted in French and English by Jefferson Lewis and coproduced by Fox-Fire Films, Production Docu2 and the NFB.

International coproduction

In other news, the NFB’s international coproduction unit has concluded master partnership agreements with ARTE France, France’s l’Institut national de l’audiovisuel and LARK International, a consortium of four PBS stations (KCTS Seattle, KUHT Houston, KETC St. Louis and Nebraska Educational Telecommunications).

NFB chair Jacques Bensimon says discussions are also underway with France 5 and BBC. The new unit, under veteran executive producer Eric Michel, anticipates aggregate coproduction activity will increase to $20 million from $9 million over the next two years. Bensimon says the international agreements ‘will directly benefit Canadian producers and broadcasters. For instance, the agreement with ARTE France should open up possibilities for coproducing programs for ARTV in Canada.’

-www.nfb.ca/preview