When Canada’s screen industry faced a cultural reckoning in 2020 to address systemic racism, one of the loudest calls was for the collection of race-based data.

It was a call that the Black Screen Office (BSO), founded that same year, answered loud and clear in 2022, publishing a series of reports – titled Being Seen, Being Counted, and Being Heard – with insight on Black audiences, as well as Black producers, artists and crews working in the industry.

“The research itself is groundbreaking, so the revelations have been eye-opening for many – and not just here in Canada,” BSO co-founder and executive director Joan Jenkinson (pictured) tells Playback. “I’ve spoken to industry professionals and funders from around the globe and they are fascinated by BSO’s research and its potential local applicability and replicability.”

Completing these studies was a massive group effort, including the current and past BSO board of directors, Being Seen research team lead Kelly Lynne Ashton, and Being Counted and Being Heard research support Lindsay Valve, lead consultant at agency Quilin.

“The Being Seen directives are central to achieving real transformation across the industry… Our intention is to keep sharing them and, critically, gathering feedback on how real-world implementation of the directives is going.” — Joan Jenkinson, BSO co-founder and executive director

The organization has already taken direct action from the research outcomes, including the establishment of the Being Seen collaborative network with industry decision-makers to work toward unifying their approach to equity, diversity and inclusion.

The BSO has also formed the career accelerator program, which has attracted partner organizations such as the Directors Guild of Canada and CPAC, with plans to recruit partners “from the highest levels of government,” according to Jenkinson.

The BSO has introduced several initiatives outside of its research work, including the Rogers-BSO Development Fund, and the Black Creators Film Festival initiative. The latter has led to critical industry connections at the Cannes Film Festival and, most recently, Content London, with a delegation expected to attend the European Film Market in Berlin in February.

“[The positive international response] was a clear reminder that the oft-used line that there ‘isn’t a market’ for Black stories is obviously baseless and a convenient way to stay stuck in the past,” says Jenkinson.

Building on their work will involve “bold steps to do things differently,” says Jenkinson, pointing to Festivale, their pre-development initiative with Crave to create the first bilingual anthology series by and about Black Canadians, as an example.

“We are thinking about a studio collective that unites all of our talent development initiatives under one umbrella,” she says. “As Black creators and industry professionals who have been excluded for too long, it’s not enough to simply take a place at the back of the line and wait our turn. Acceleration for us means moving to the front of the line and making the content that we know wants to be seen. A BSO studio collective would help achieve that.”

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s Winter 2022 issue