The Ontario Centre of the National Film Board, like its counterparts Documentary East and West, has a difficult balancing act in play.

On one hand its role is to keep open the doors of innovative and exploratory doc-making, unhampered by market constraints. At the same time, it must produce commercially viable films reaching wide audiences.

‘Our mandate is to support films which are original, creatively ambitious and tell Canadian stories – the types of films which are often not supported within the existing infrastructure that has developed for industrial documentaries,’ says Ontario Documentary Program executive producer Louise Lore.

‘However, the nfb objectives clearly articulate that we are to make films which will be seen by wide numbers of Canadians. tv is the most accessible delivery system so we are looking for films that will be popular to broad audiences,’ says Lore.

‘We walk a fine line trying to satisfy both those mandates.’

The studio also tries to spread its financial resources among the widest range of projects – from big-budget theatrical docs to smaller tv fare. With the nfb’s restructuring in ’94/95, production budgets actually rose from $1.6 million at each of the three doc studios to the current $2.6-million level, although its total operating budget decreased from $82 million to $56 million.

In ’96/97, six films were produced out of the Ontario studio and 10 were made in fiscal ’97/98. The upcoming year will see 11 to 12 films produced as funds are spread among more projects. Budgets range from a low of $120,000 to a high of $750,000, and span an array of formats from video and Beta to Super 16.

The restructuring also saw the teams at each center grow from two to four producers. In Ontario, the nfb staffers are Silva Basmajian, Peter Starr, Gerry Flahive and Karen King.

Their game plan is to work with a mix of emerging and established directors. In addition to financing, the nfb producers say the agency offers new and veteran filmmakers ‘a collaborative fostering environment’ in which they can explore their potential with an experienced production team.

Whereas the nfb once participated at levels as low as 10% in productions, the minimum coproduction level has been raised to 40%. The board stresses that although it is a government entity, it is a creative producer not a funding agency.

When it comes to pitches, the nfb is looking for ideas with a fresh, daring twist which will make for accessible, although not necessarily tv-driven, documentaries with filmic rather than journalistic elements.

The board is becoming more pro-active in developing relationships with broadcasters and presales are an important part of the financing strategy. However, the nfb producers say they are not crafting projects solely with broadcast sales in mind. Projects can run the range of innovative festival-bound fare to more mainstream programs. Contrary to popular belief, social-issue films are far from the only projects taken on, say the producers. But avant-garde, experimental docs are not the nfb’s forte.

The Ontario Centre’s current slate offers some insight into the diversity of its projects.

Project Grizzly director Peter Lynch’s follow-up, The Herd, is an epic adventure reenacting the story of a group of Innuit and Lapp herders who set out in 1929 to drive 3,000 reindeer from Alaska into the Northwest Territories as part of a reindeer relocation project.

Dubbed the nfb’s Titanic, the feature-length doc involved the actual herding of reindeer through the Arctic and aerial footage shot from a helicopter.

Starr, the producer, describes the $650,000, 16mm film as ‘big and cinematic.’

The Herd will be completed this June and the aim is to launch it at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Rats are the topic of investigation for a coproduction with Jacques Hollender and Nemesis Productions, licensed to tvontario. The one-hour, $400,000 film looks at how humans deal with rats, but from a unique perspective – often the camera takes the point of view of the vermin themselves and follows them through their labyrinthine world of the city sewer system.

Production is currently underway, with shoots scheduled in New York, Toronto, Detroit and Alberta.

Starr will coproduce a film with Tal-El Productions profiling Dr. Daniel Ling and the controversy surrounding hearing implants for the deaf. He has also initiated the project Smoke and Mirrors, a look at how talent is packaged in the music industry.

‘Slice of life’ films aptly describe some of the offbeat projects Basmajian is developing.

A feature-length docudrama based on the humorous and wry wit of Charles Ritchie’s diaries is being penned by David MacFarland and John Walker, who will also direct. Ritchie grew up in Nova Scotia, studied at Oxford and had an exciting career as a diplomat stationed in London during wwii and in Washington.

Jeannette Loakman’s Slippery Blisses exploring the history, science, social and cultural implications of kissing, interwoven with some entertaining anecdotes on the agonies of dating.

Home movies are the subject of Karen Shopsowitz’s doc My Father’s Camera (working title), which will explore, with a good dose of humor, how all those undiscovered gems reveal so much about our society and culture.

‘An irreverent but gentle’ study of grandmothers is being developed with director Wendy Rowland.

Flahive and director Bill Cobban will figure out how Canada’s Mounties became a national symbol. The one-hour has been presold to cbc’s Witness for delivery this spring.

A Cold War mystery tale is in the works with doc maker John Kramer on Canadian Ambassador to Egypt Herbert Norman who jumped to his death in 1957 after having been accused of being a Communist spy by the u.s. Senate subcommittee.

The feature-length, $600,000 film is being shot in Ottawa, Toronto, Boston, Washington, London, Japan, and Egypt for delivery in May. The cbc is currently looking at the program.

Toyota Canada has offered to put money into the film – no strings attached – as Norman was considered one of the most respected international experts on Japanese history.

Production begins in March on Truth Merchants, a coproduction with producer Michael McMahon and director Kevin McMahon. The $300,000, one-hour explores the world of public relations and has been presold to Witness.

Flahive’s development slate also includes Catherine Annau’s Just Watch Me: Trudeau and the ’70s, profiling the generation that came of age politically and personally during this era.

A film on alcohol and its use ‘to lubricate creativity and social relationships’ is being developed with Julia Walden.

Thin Ice with filmmaker Laurence Green is based on a book by expatriate Canadian Bruce McCall, currently a writer with the New Yorker, who penned a darkly funny memoir of growing up in Southern Ontario in the ’40s and ’50s.

King is responsible for developing projects which explore cultural diversity and is currently working on Canada’s Unwanted Soldiers with Jari Osborne and Phoenix Media Productions. The one-hour film is the untold story of Chinese Canadian soldiers in wwii.

Vision tv has committed to Journey to Little Rock, to be produced by King and Maria Shin, with Tob Thompson as director. The doc profiles Jean Trickey, a black student who was integrated into an Arkansas high school and later moved to Canada where she has continued a battle for social justice.

And Go Forth and Make Disciples of Men, in development with producer Carlo Liconti and director Milton Bryant, looks at a street preacher from Grenada caught in red tape with immigration and medical officials.

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Also in this report:

– Hot Docs! brings in international players p. 36

– A sampling of Canada’s emerging doc directors p. 36

– An indie filmmaker chronicles his Seven Days in Cambodia p. 38

– Hot Docs! distrib options p. 39

– Nominees for the fifth annual Hot Docs! awards p. 47