In This Report

Playback is highlighting some of the film and tv prodcos forging new ground on the Western landscapes of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Partners In Motion, based in Saskatchewan, has moved from its long-time commercial and doc staples into the dramatic genre, as has HBW Productions in Alberta. Manitoba’s Visual Marketing is taking advantage of a generous labor incentive and making the leap from corporate work into docmaking. Blue Hill Productions in Saskatchewan is gearing up for an $8.5 million mini-series, the biggest project in its 10-year history, and Alberta -based Nomadic Pictures, behind recent theatrical and mow successes, has a three-pack of movies on the go and is setting its sights on foreign markets. Missing Link Productions continues to develop an eclectic mix of non-fiction programs and is looking to u.k. partners to overcome the financial obstacles of producing on the Alberta scene.

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Sherry Kozac – she of the quick and hearty laugh – wants to set the record straight: she is more than just The Bird Lady.

As the proprietor of Calgary-based Missing Link Productions, Kozac has won awards, a reputation, and a ready source of business by doing half-hour and one-hour documentaries of the feathered kind. But she’s also created successful documentaries about the human body, ozone depletion and third-world economics.

Still, as Kozac readily admits, the current plight of Alberta-based producers is making her think of flying the coup.

‘I’ve been trying to hire Alberta people for my projects to support the industry here,’ Kozac says. ‘The demise of the ampdc [Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation] and the fragmentation of the broadcast market are making it more difficult. If there is going to be a tax credit [in Alberta] it better come soon. I might have to move.’

She thinks maybe Vancouver Island or Halifax.

Kozac got her start in filmmaking by accident. Backpacking through Asia, she took work as a production assistant in Hong Kong on a television series she describes as the Chinese Dynasty. Later in her tour, she traveled to Australia where serendipity struck again and she found work as a production coordinator for a feature film.

Back home in Canada, Kozac decided to pursue the path of her apparent fate and took a summer film course at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, then worked on the notorious tax-shelter films in Toronto in the 1980s.

Disgusted with the film experience, she swore off the industry and went home to Alberta where, ultimately, she was wooed back by ACCESS Television to work on a kids’ adventure series called The Magic Ring. Her faith restored in the film and television medium, Kozac decided to take up documentary making and explore her other passions, specifically, global social causes such as Oxfam.

‘I wanted to make the issues of the Third World relevant to our lives,’ she says of her mission.

Her first effort was Bigger than a Basket, a documentary about basket-weaving women in Zimbabwe who are positively impacted by the cash earned through international markets established for their products by Oxfam. The documentary was sold widely to schools and won an award from the Chicago International Film Festival in 1990.

Next up was a documentary called Coffee Break about coffee exporting in Tanzania.

With her initial three-part, half-hour series about birds, Kozac strived to be more entertaining than educational. Birders of a Feather (about eco-tourism), Singing in the Rainforest (about the disappearance of song birds in the rain forest and their summertime Canadian habitat) and For the Birds (about the successful conservation of the peregrine falcon), won acclaim, wide distribution and awards from wildlife groups.

Her reputation as The Bird Lady was cemented when she followed her initial avian success with two one-hours: Night Moves (about owls) and Bird Brains (about bird intelligence), each made on a $250,000 budget.

But before she embarked on bird stories, she stresses, ‘I thought natural bird habitat was a turkey in the oven.’

All the bird documentaries have enjoyed the participation of The Discovery Channel and education stations such as The Knowledge Network.

Today, she’s developing an unnamed six-part, one-hour series about the changing millennium. The u.k. coproduction will have a $500,000-per-episode budget and will be delivered in phases between 2001 and 2003.

Kozac is also working on a piece called The Making of Man, which showcases eight male old-timers – such as a rancher and a coal miner – who take part in a contemporary dance.

The producer is also struggling to finance Veil of Silence, an inside and volatile story about the plight of Afghani women that is demanding a high insurance premium be paid to protect the crew.

Other productions Kozac has worked on include two episodes of the Discovery series The Body Inside. One episode called ‘Skin Deep’ was about the science of growing human organs and Breathless focused on a teen with asthma.

A non-theatrical one-hour for the United Nations and the University of Calgary called Business as Usual was about the global trends to create work for the disabled.