Telefilm Canada is cutting its funding to the Ottawa International Animation Festival after having been the major government resource behind the event for nearly 30 years.

Alliance Atlantis Communications, reported a loss of $18.8 million in its fiscal year ended March 31, 2003. This compares to net earnings of $27.5 million the previous year.

Data released in June by Statistics Canada indicating marked losses in motion picture exhibition in 2000/01 does not accurately reflect the state of the industry, according to some experts.

Following up their successful partnership on 100 Days in the Jungle, CTV and Edmonton production company ImagiNation Film and Television Productions are teaming on a second MOW, Selling Innocence.

CTV’S Canadian Idol drew more than two million viewers for its premiere episode on June 9. That’s a big number for a Canadian show under any circumstances, but given that CI, another international version of U.K. smash Pop Idol, went head to head with the first period of game seven of the Stanley Cup Final between the New Jersey Devils and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, it’s a near miracle it was even competitive. As it stands, game seven generated about 2.6 million viewers for CBC.

You’d never know it with the black cloud hanging over the Canadian production industry, but Canada has the fastest growing entertainment and media market in the world, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Over the last two years, the Canadian industry has ‘outpaced’ all of the other countries surveyed in PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2003 – 2007.

More than 12,000 short film lovers came out for the Canadian Film Centre’s 2003 Worldwide Short Film Festival, held June 3-8 in Toronto, an attendance increase of 20% from the 2002 edition.

It seems fitting with Canada’s new tolerance for pot smoking that Halifax’s After Dark Productions is currently in development on its first feature, A Bug and a Bag of Weed.
According to After Dark’s Chris Cuthbertson, the film is about three computer store salesmen who inherit a hockey bag full of marijuana from a wild high school friend. Not knowing what else to do with it, they decide to sell the pot using sales tactics learned in their store, and eventually wind up selling it from the store.

Despite outpacing the overall growth of Canadian content produced in the last six years and reaching $420 million in production in 2001/02, the Canadian documentary industry is faced with filling more commissioned TV hours on lower budgets. This is the ultimate theme of a report obtained by Playback titled ‘Getting Real,’ to be released at the Banff Television Festival by the Documentary Organization of Canada.

The deal between Toronto’s Alliance Atlantis Communications and Hollywood-based video and film asset management service Point.360 for the purchase of AAC’s post-production houses Tattersall Casablanca, Salter Digital and Calibre Digital Pictures has been scuttled.

Organizers of the Innoversity Creative Summit 2003 ‘made it’ through the two-day conference held in Toronto May 22-23 with a better-than-expected turnout given the current situation in Toronto and its nagging SARS scare.

One day before the Canadian Independent Film & Video Fund was to name its latest round of recipients, the Department of Canadian Heritage announced the fund was being cut by $250,000, a major blow to independent documentary filmmakers who depend on the money to finance and finish their projects.