On the party circuit in Cannes, France, where Reed Midem holds the MIP-TV market, the strangest nightclub/bastille to be stormed is called the Cat Corner. From without, it’s just a narrow, windowless black door on the left as you ascend from the Croisette, the boulevard that gives Cannes a brief pause as it tumbles from the steep hillside to the tide-less sea.

At Cat Corner, as it is with banks and very chic boutiques in Europe, you have to press a buzzer and then wait. And sweat. And wonder, have I got the wrong night? Or, quelle horreur, what if – what if I bought a bad translation of Market Schmoozing for Dummies?

Meanwhile, presumably, someone unseen within mutely gives you the once-over. Decides whether you’re a program seller with bad PAL, a power-crazed buyer packing an axe or just some jet-lagged filmmaker trying to get a show financed.

I never did get buzzed in at the Corner, legit party invite notwithstanding, and I can only muse as to why. (Of course, I ended up at Granada’s wonderful Beatles dance-til-you-throw-a-hip party and twisted and shouted until – but I digress.)

Thinking back on L’affaire Corner, the fortress inscrutable, I can relate to Canadian filmmakers who are now trying to buzz themselves inside another apparent stronghold, the labyrinthine new guidelines for feature film producers in the Canada Feature Film Fund.

Certainly, these are draft guidelines, which is good news, since they are a new source of keening debate. Around the phase-out of minimum guarantees, around which films/prodcos did or didn’t make the top-20 list and around the eternal argument on whether the guidelines foster an industrial model that favors coproduction and more flexible rules on lead actors, or a cultural model which forces producers to use Canadian leads.

With all the fuss about finally creating a Canadian star system to drive the marketing engines, it would seem better sense for the forward-thinking CFFF to instead encourage the pairing of foreign leads with Canadian actors (in Claire’s Hat, Canadian Callum Keith Rennie stars with Juliette Lewis and Gina Gershon).

It might be impolitic to compare Canada’s film funding system to a woman, but for those of you struggling to respond to the CFFF guidelines, try invoking poet Dorothy Livesay’s The Unquiet Bed. Substitute the word ‘funders’ where the poet wrote ‘parents,’ and ‘money’ where she wrote ‘love’.

The woman I am/ is not what you see/ I’m not just bones/ and cockery…

the woman I am/ knew love and hate/ hating the chains/ that parents make

longing that love/ might set men free/ yet hold them fast/ in loyalty

the woman I am/ is not what you see/ move over love/ make room for me

That should remind you of the French approach to balancing money and culture, and that alongside the azure beauty of the Riviera runs a boulevard called the Croisette beneath which is plainly visible a bottom line etched in stone.

SUSAN TOLUSSO, Editor