Montreal: Three Canadian movie classics, including Gilles Carle’s La Vraie nature de Bernadette are among this year’s AV Preservation Trust.CA Masterworks 2001 selections. The feature films as well as new selections in television, radio and sound recordings were announced Feb. 19 at a Heritage Day ceremony held on Parliament Hill.

The Masterworks 2001 films selected for preservation include the first notable private-sector animation film The Loon’s Necklace (Crawley Films, 1949), the late Philip Borsos 1982 historical drama The Grey Fox (producer Peter O’Brian) and Carle’s 1972 La Vraie nature de Bernadette (Les Productions Carle Lamy).

In TV, the selections include the first Quebec sitcom starring the legendary Olivier Guimond, Cre-Basile (Tele-Metropole, 1965-70), and two landmark series, Femmes d’aujourd’hui (Radio-Canada, 1965-82) and SCTV (1976-84).

The Heritage Day ceremony was attended by Heritage Minister Sheila Copps; Masterworks chair Sandra Macdonald, government film commissioner and National Film Board chair; Astral Television Networks president and CEO Lisa de Wilde; AV Preservation Trust president Brian Robertson; and Ian Wilson, Canada’s national archivist.

AV Preservation Trust core members include the CBC, the National Archives, Telefilm Canada, the National Film Board and Astral Media movie channel Moviepix, in the case of the Masterworks project. The Department of Canadian Heritage has contributed to the trust’s website and last year’s first round of Masterworks selections.

"We are always looking for sponsors to adopt a particular Masterwork or to support the ongoing operations of the Trust," says Catherine Hurley, executive director and CEO of the AV Preservation Trust, a non-profit alliance of private and public sector partners. "I think it really behooves production companies and the industry to take a look at their collections from an asset management point of view. There’s been a lot of mergers, and so now, just in terms of that asset valuation and management, there is also very much an economic imperative."

In its Canadian Feature Film Policy announcement last fall, Heritage allocated $750,000 a year for three years for the preservation of moving picture projects. Much of that funding is earmarked for "legacy works" at the National Archives. *

-www.avpreservationtrust.ca

-www.nationalarchives.ca