Michael Allder is a producer at the National Film Board and is one of the organizers of postput, a selection of films from INPUT ’95 that will be playing in Toronto and other cities in the fall. Allder attended this year’s input International Public Television screening conference in San Sebastian, Spain, May 14-20, and files this report.

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INPUT is well known for its backstage dramas, especially among its multinational board members, but in this, its eighteenth year, there were new and unexpected twists to the plot, particularly for Canadians.

First came the fish fight, then the hassle over our visas, and finally, for some, there was the flight. On taking off from Montreal, the pilot of a Madrid-bound Iberian plane carrying an advance guard of a 97-strong Canadian contingent apparently tried to outpace a violent thunderstorm by a series of rapid banks and swerves. By the time the party finally reached San Sebastian on the Atlantic coast of Spain, any preflight red tape was all but forgotten as the survivors swapped near-death stories that had all the makings of a Man Alive show.

Subtitled the International Public Television screening conference, input has no fixed home, no budget, no permanent secretariat, and is presided over by a charismatic 70-something anarchist, Sergio Borelli.

Unlike almost all other film festivals, input doesn’t charge an enrollment fee, doesn’t sell tickets, and is held in a different country each year. This year the host was Basque public television; next year it will be a consortium of Mexican television companies and universities. After Mexico, France, after France it will be held in Germany.

Borelli likes to keep the conference on its toes, so to speak, an attitude that goes back to his days as producer of the Italian equivalent of This Hour Has Seven Days, a show which, like its Canadian counterpart, was allegedly axed through managerial insecurity.

The premise is simple. Each year input invites a selection of programs from around the world that are chosen for their innovation – in content, and in style.

The director or producer must also attend, to answer questions or to respond to reactions from delegates. The comment is not always friendly. One Scandinavian producer was accused of Svengali-like manipulation of information, while a voluble Brit was reduced to silence when told by another veteran British producer that in his experience there were two types of filmmaker, those who loved humanity, and those who loved themselves.

This year, as often in the past, input provided clear evidence of seismic happenings, newly emerging fault lines on the programming map. In documentary programming, fly-on-the-wall style observation or the more traditional style of voice-over led narration were seemingly eclipsed by a continuing interest in new or revived forms of storytelling.

Delegates were particularly enthusiastic about the British independently made feature-length documentary, Tales From A Hard City, a film which to a large extent builds an improvised story around its central characters, a reflection of the lives, but also an amplification.

There was also clear interest in two films by Toronto filmmaker and urban anthropologist Peter Lynch, Arrowhead and St. Bruno, My Eyes As A Stranger, and rew fwd, directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Other documentaries that caught the eye of delegates included Alexandra The Thin, an eloquent but painful essay on torture and betrayal by Chilean filmmaker Carmen Castillo, whose husband was murdered by the Chilean military; and Satya, A Prayer for the Enemy, directed by American filmmaker Ellen Bruno, which documents the experiences of Tibetan nuns imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese. Powerful, and visually inventive, the film was produced on a budget of $30,000.

An Australian film, 50 Years of Silence, which tells the story of a group of young Dutch prisoners of war forced to work in a brothel, was one of several films that set off what can only be described as a bidding war between Canadian commissioning editors. The sight of rival executive producers racing for the phones to snap up a documentary proved particularly rewarding to many of the Canadian filmmakers who lived through the dark days of the ’80s.

In the drama category, the bbc film Genghis Cohn was the outright winner, convincing proof that the embattled corporation is still, on occasion, the world’s most courageous producer of one-off drama.

Produced by Ruth Caleb, and based on the book by Romain Gary, the film describes the tragic comic dilemma of a Bavarian chief of police, a former Nazi who is tormented by the memory of one of his victims, and a Jewish night club comedian, Genghis Cohn.

The bbc dance drama Strange Fish, which though based on a stage performance was completely readapted for the camera, was another virtuoso performance, a bit like a collaboration between Martin Scorsese and La La La Human Steps.

Other Canadian films amongst the nine selected for the festival, the largest incidentally from any member country, included the internationally acclaimed Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, and another Rhombus venture, the visually arresting September Song; The Music of Kurt Weill, whose producer, Niv Fichman, in a moment of candor remarked, amongst other things, that the budget was around us$1.5 million, plus facilities.

Neal Docherty’s polemic, The Trouble With Evan, was also well received. One Scandinavian woman filmmaker seized the mike at the beginning of the discussion period, and remarked succinctly that ‘it was the best f…… film on the subject I’ve ever seen.’

A suitable epitaph for Canadian production in a week which also ended with some Canadian changes in the boardroom. input’s president is now Norm Bolen, head of current affairs at cbc, replacing Gaetan Lapointe, and its new secretary general is Cynthia Reyes, head of cbc tv news and current affairs training.